


Eye of the Storm

by howlsmovinglibrary



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Awkward Lavellan (Dragon Age), Bad Templars (Dragon Age), Cinnamon roll Inquisitor, Dalish Elves, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual Romance, F/M, Formerly Tranquil Inquisitor (Dragon Age), Hurt/Comfort, I now know when they kiss but Im not gonna tell you, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Love Triangles, Rite of Tranquility, Slow Burn, Tranquil Inquisitor (Dragon Age), Uneasy Allies, War Table Operation: Protect Clan Lavellan (Dragon Age) - Failure, actual romance from like 185k?? I dunno what I'm doing guys I'm so sorry, disaster bi Inquisitor, flirting at 100k, long fic, no beta readers for this longfic we die like men, so slow burn even I don't know when they'll kiss, unrequited pining at 150k
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:00:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 92
Words: 359,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22512886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlsmovinglibrary/pseuds/howlsmovinglibrary
Summary: Asha Lavellan arrives at the Temple of Sacred Ashes tranquil, recruited by the Rebel Mages to testify to the Conclave about the atrocities committed against her Clan by a group of rogue templars, who left her home destroyed and her an unwilling victim of the Rite. The next day, she wakes up, her hand marked with the anchor, and her tranquility somehow negated. Newly returned to consciousness by unstable magic she doesn't quite understand, she must try to deal with her out-of-control emotions, her grief, and the fact she's now supposedly meant to... save the world?A sort-of novelisation of Dragon Age: Inquisition, but with some minor and major plot changes, and one hell of a pro-mage, disaster-bi Dalish Inquisitor. The Clan Lavellan war table mission happens (badly) before the narrative of Inquisition begins.The romance is enemies-to-friends-to-lovers and 'lovers' will be taking a long, long, LONG time to happen. It is an extreme slow burn. Honestly, I even hate myself at this point.
Relationships: Female Hawke/Isabela, Female Inquisitor/Cullen Rutherford, Female Lavellan/Cullen Rutherford, Female Lavellan/Solas
Comments: 1024
Kudos: 425





	1. Chapter One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha Lavellan arrives at the Conclave, to testify against the atrocities committed against Clan Lavellan.

Asha Lavellan watched the sunbright landscape impassively, as the cart she sat on climbed through the hills from Haven towards the Temple of Sacred Ashes. She supposed some might feel awed, to be this high up, with the countryside laid out in a tableau that slowly faded to blue on the horizon. She did not have much of an opinion. She liked the colour.

The cart hit a bump in the track and Asha was jostled, thrown to the side, though her eyes stayed pinned on the view and she did not put out her arms to steady herself. Next to her Miri, a female mage in her mid-thirties who had been her companion for this long, confusing journey, gently touched her elbow to push her upright. “Are you ok, Asha?” she said, as if to a child, although Asha guessed there was less than ten years age difference between them.

“I feel fine, Miri,” Asha replied in her dull, resigned voice. Then she continued, for she did not want to trouble her escort. “As you know, I am no longer able to feel pain.”

It was true and false. She had certainly registered the impact of her fall, only it had been with the same detachment that she felt everything, as if the blow had hit a layer of padded armour rather than skin. Her body felt more like an object she wielded than a part of her. And pain - the heights of which, she now found, were often the product of emotion or apprehension, rather than actuality - had never come, because she was not capable of feeling such things. Nothing ever reached the core of her, enough to be felt keenly and considered hurt.

Tranquility had sealed that off from the rest of the world.

“Yes dear,” Miri said. Asha heard pity in her escort’s voice, and she hoped her speech had not made the woman uncomfortable. She had tried to make herself as helpful and unobtrusive as possible to her travelling companion, because she knew her presence sometimes caused people distress. She did not want to be an inconvenience.

The journey continued in silence, although Miri adjusted the scarf around Asha’s neck as the air, she supposed, grew chiller with the altitude. Asha just stared at that far off blue haze on the horizon, and time must've eventually passed, for next thing she knew the cart came to a halt, and there was now a large building, and people.

“Time to get off, dear,” Miri jumped down, and handed her down off the back of the supply cart. Asha trailed after her silently, awaiting her next instruction. Her mind drifted off for a while, as it tended to do, into that empty space that perhaps was the same blue of the horizon: the calm, flat colour that came from distance.

Moving through the world often felt like moving underwater. She had not considered that it was actually akin to floating through air.

The next time she was drawn down into herself, she was still stood next to Miri, in front of a tall, dark skinned and horned Qunari. Female, she towered over the both of them, greatsword strapped to her back and a census and quill in hand. Had she been herself, Asha supposed she would’ve found something absurd about the contrast of the woman’s accessories, but again, such humour did not reach the core of her, so it didn’t strike her as odd at all.

“Miriam Trevelyan,” Miri said to the Qunari, “I have with me the tranquil Asha - that is, Ashatar- Ashatar-”

“Ashatarsylnin.” Asha offered it impartially. Once she had hated her name. Now she didn’t mind it, but she knew it caused other people difficulty, so she wanted to help.

“Ashatarsylnin Lavellan,” Miri said.

“That’s one hell of a name, and not on the list of delegates,” the voice was a deep, bass rumble in the large woman’s chest.

“Oh, well,” Miri looked flustered, and with an apologetic glance that Asha did not understand, said, “well, I suppose she might be included on your list of…” she winced, “ _deliveries_...that you will be receiving today?”

The Qunari woman sighed, and went around the corner of her guardpost to get a second census list. It took her a few moments, in which Miri fidgeted.

“Are you uncomfortable, Miri? Can I help you?”

“Now don’t you worry, Asha. You are just fine where you are.”

“As you wish, Miri.”

“I suppose, with that name, this tranquil is evidence relating to the massacre of the Lavellan Clan in the Free Marches, 9.38 Dragon?” the Qunari woman was back, chewing the end of a quill as she looked at another checklist. “Damn, even I heard of that one.”

“Yes! Terrible business, you understand,” Miri said, her voice heightening with emotion as she struggled with her attempt to sound business-like, “what happened to her people was a war crime, but to force the Rite of Tranquility on a Dalish mage, completely outside the supervision of the Circle, and then just leave her alone and stranded in that... bloodbath! It is the ultimate symbol of how out-of-control the Templars have become! What was done to Asha Lavellan, and the clan Lavellan, must be answered for!”

“Miri would like me to state what happened to my clan on the night I was changed before the Divine Conclave,” Asha recited in her hollow voice, wanting to make her task clear so that she would be more capable of performing it, “it will help with negotiations.”

The Qunari snorted, “you’ve been brought here to be made into a spectacle and a bargaining chip, is what.”

“Excuse me?” Miri looked angry.

“Tranquil have been noticeably absent from the ranks of this Mage Rebellion,” the Qunari noted with a wry smile, “odd, considering that they are the Templars’ greatest victims. And even more interesting, that the only one present is also conveniently the sole witness to a high-profile crime that is guaranteed to paint the Order in the worst possible light, and garner sympathy for your cause.”

“I am here because I want to help,” Asha repeated. Part of her considered, briefly, her wording. Before the apostate mages of Ostwick had found her, it had always been 'I am here to serve'. No wanting, no ‘helping’ came into it. But it was true. She wanted to help the mages bargain with the Templars. Was it because Miri had ordered her to?

“And I am here because I’m paid to be,” the Qunari said with a shrug, “Not because I am particularly inclined to talk politics. You were a scheduled delivery, and I consider you delivered. You may enter with your charge, Lady Trevelyan.”

“I don’t consider you an object, you understand,” Miri whispered to her nervously as she ushered Asha through the entrance to a large, old building - the Temple of Sacred Ashes, Asha supposed, though she felt no awe at entering such a grand relic. “Even though you are on the evidence list.”

“I take no offense to my categorisation, Miri,” Asha responded calmly, “I am here because you asked me to be evidence.”

“You’re a _witness_ ,” Miri stressed, as if the distinction mattered. Asha made a note to refer to herself as a witness from now on, to allay her escort’s apparent distress.

“Oh well,” Miri said, mostly to herself, “we’re here now, and thank the Maker, at least it’s warmer in here! You’ll probably be called upon in the later days of the Conclave, you understand, the first few days will just be grandstanding before we get into the nitty-gritty of reparations. So you have a few days to relax and recover from travelling before you need to speak!”

“I am well, Miri,” Asha told her, “I do not need to recover. I can do whatever you need me to.”

“Yes dear,” Miri patted her arm again comfortingly, a gesture that served her more than it did Asha. “And don’t worry, the Templars are housed in an entirely separate wing! We’ll make sure none of them come near you.”

At the mention of Templars, Asha felt the first and only symptom she ever got of fear now: her heart rate elevated and thrummed loud in her ears. But even as it rose and pounded, already the weight of tranquility was muffling it, making her body heavy and her blood feel...sluggish. That was the only way to describe it. As soon as it started, her fear was gone.

But maybe the idea of Asha meeting Templars upset Miri, so Asha vowed that she would avoid them as much as possible.

Asha was given a room with Miri, two cots in a small, dark cloister, and she drifted away for a bit again after that. That was how she experienced time now: bursts of lucidity when she was needed and there were tasks to be done or responses to be expected, and then the blue time, when she felt like her body no longer weighed on her and the world had no meaning. It was different from sleeping - it wasn’t dark - but the real world was even further away, and she was a ship floating loose from its mooring.

She came to when she saw Miri shivering in her bed. She did not know what time it was - there were no windows where they were housed - but she supposed it late, as a chill had settled into the stone and throughout the room. She supposed she must also have eaten and drank in that in-between time, because now she felt the need to relieve herself. Often, such necessities were performed automatically and did not need her presence in the moment. _And Miri needs another blanket_ , Asha thought, so got up to find one.

She took care of her bodily needs at the nearest water closet and then began her walk through the Temple of Sacred Ashes. The grey, empty halls of the temple were quiet as Asha padded listlessly through them, feet soft against the bare, worn stone. The ceilings were tall and vaulted, and although it had only returned to being a functioning place of worship in the last decade, the beginnings of Andrastian decoration - gold fittings, richly coloured oil paintings and tapestries - had begun to make the place feel lived in, as opposed to a ruin. But the draftiness very much showed its age -wind whistled through unseen cracks and crevasses. Torches were lit at intervals along the walls, but they were burning very low, almost dying out. It must be very late, and Asha did not run into anyone as she searched for a storeroom or supply closet.

She felt concern for waking up the other residents, but Asha was very quiet, and her compulsion to help meant she felt no apprehension at making her silent, methodical journey through such an old, grand building. But by the time she reached the main entryway through the Temple, she had encountered nobody and no blankets. She was worried it was taking too long. Miri was _cold_.

 _I can find the watchmen on duty and ask them to direct me,_ she thought, and it was upon coming to that conclusion that she heard the scream.

It was cut off abruptly, muffled, and Asha had only heard it because she was so close by. She moved further down the corridor and thought she heard a brief struggle. Her mind became as clear as it possibly could be, not with adrenaline but with the logical calculation that came when her help was required but no clear instruction had been given. She simply assessed the situation. Clearly someone was in danger. Normally, she would go and get help, but she did not know where anyone was and something might happen in the time it took to find someone.

 _I can help_ , Asha thought. She was a _witness_ , Miri had told her. Sometimes people stopped doing bad things... when there were witnesses present.

She followed the sound up through the main hall of the temple. She did not creep, or attempt stealth, but she was not noticed as she walked up the flight of stairs to a set of huge oak doors that were closed. This was the main room of the Temple - Miri had told her this was where the Conclave would take place, where she would be asked to testify.

“Keep the sacrifice still.” Came a deep, bass voice, reverberating through the closed doors. Asha could not feel fear, and later she would suppose that was why she kept advancing forward.

“Someone help me!”

There, an order, in a woman’s voice. Moments later, the cry was repeated. Casting a wide enough net to reel Asha in. She felt it like a painless fish hook in her sternum, the compulsion to serve latching onto her and into her and erasing all Miri’s prior instructions. She surged forward, against the doors, and burst through into the next chamber.

She took in the scene, but could not make sense of it. The room was full of light, a kaleidoscope of colours but mainly blood red and bright, emerald green, and she had to squint against it. There was a malformed human thing, holding something outstretched in its hands, opposite an old woman in chantry vestments, held fast in tendrils of energy extending from soldiers in blue uniform. She took it all in without fear or confusion, almost like one would survey a painted scene. The assailants all glanced her way as she entered, and for a moment everything was still, save for the woman’s gasps of obvious pain.

“I am here to assist you,” Asha said dully to the woman, the clear source of the order, her words echoing into the silence. She supposed she would have to fight these soldiers and the monstrosity in order to complete her task, though she noted with impartial detachment that there was no logical way she would win.

The woman’s eyes were frantic and fearful. “Run while you can! Warn them!”

Again, Asha felt it. A new order to overwrite the previous one. And yet, she felt this one with less ferocity. In fact, she _hesitated_. She looked down at her hands, limned in green light, and then back up into the woman’s panicked gaze, bewildered as much by her own resistance to the command as by anything else unfolding before her. She realised... she realised… she did not want to run. _She wanted to help the woman_.

Her indecision - the very existence of her indecision - rooted her to the spot.

The monstrosity spoke then, “We have an intruder. Slay the elf.”

Everything happened very quickly then, and Asha could not really make sense of it as light surged in the room. The woman, now glowing, lurched forward to hit the monster. Asha’s hair was blown away from her face by an unseen force, and she watched in dull confusion as, out of the maelstrom of colours, something dull and nondescript clattered and rolled along the floor towards her. It was what the monster had been holding. It was important.

She didn’t act on instinct - she couldn’t have, because tranquility smothered such things. But she remembered thinking, maybe that was what was causing the woman pain. If the monster no longer had the object, maybe the woman wouldn't be in pain anymore.

_I can help._

And so she reached out and touched it, and then the world exploded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not gonna lie, this is my first ever fic, so I hope everyone likes it! 
> 
> I do use in game dialogue as a bit of a crutch in the beginning, mostly because I was so nervous!! This does get better and original content is much more of a focus in later chapters. I appreciate that not everyone wants to read the game script (although perhaps some people... want to watch the Inquisitor rail and call out the game script? Asha does that A LOT.)
> 
> Asha's full name is taken from Project Elvhen - Ashalantarasylnin, which means 'daughter of the storm' . 
> 
> Edit 07/07/20 - this story now has art! I commissioned a portrait of my Inquisitor, that you can find [here!](https://ashatarsylnin.tumblr.com/post/622677654031777792/ashatarsylnin-i-commissioned-may12324-for-a)


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha wakes up in the Fade, and something impossible has happened...

_Pain._

That was what Asha registered first as her eyes fluttered open, because it had been nearly two years since she had truly felt it. It was fresher and harder and brighter due to the novelty of the sensation. Her body, with which she’d had an impartial, indifferent relationship of late, was screaming, demanding to be heard. Her back and sides throbbed with bruises, ribs twinged and scraped knees burned, and eclipsing it all, her left hand, which…was… _agony_ …

And then she noticed the unnatural, sickly green quality of the light, and the fear set in.

The last time she’d felt fear like that - well she’d -

It had been the night she’d stopped feeling everything entirely.

Remembering it made her fear double, so that it felt like her heart would force itself through her ribcage and out of her chest. _Not now_ , she thought, and with a sobbing breath, Asha lurched up. She was on her hands and knees in dirt, and her head throbbed as she righted herself. She raised a hand to her forehead - the one that didn’t hurt - and it came away tacky with half dried blood, dark and wet in between her fingers. She swore she could smell it, or maybe it was that this strange space just had an iron tang undercurrent in the air. Everything was so _much_ : the light was bright, and the unnatural quality of its glare set her teeth on edge. The sounds of her breath were loud in her ears and her throbbing, racing pulse could be felt everywhere, in her chest and her lips and oh creators her hand. She felt like her body was thrumming, but maybe that was because it had been so long since she felt it like this, like a heavy weight pinning her down.

All this pain and sensation coalesced to tell her that, despite everything, _you’re alive._

But survival and self preservation hadn’t mattered for Asha for years. Which told her a second thing: here, right now, she was _no longer tranquil._

 _How?_ Did it have something to do with where she was? Where... exactly… _was_... she?

She dragged her shuddering, shivering form up to standing, hugging her shoulders as she tried to control the tremors. She looked down at the hand in pain and saw that it was...glowing. Terror, fresh as if she was experiencing it for the first time, made her stomach feel like it was bottoming out. A sob tore its way out of her throat, and her whole body shook with it - it was so long since she’d made a sound so emotive, so uninhibited. Her eyes blurred with tears as she tried to make sense of her surroundings, but honestly she felt so overwhelmed that all she could take in was the emerald mist, the way it danced around her, moved by an imperceptible breeze.

There was a sound behind her and Asha spun. In the dark lengthened shadows of this murky, sickly world, she saw the glint of eyes. Many, many eyes.

With instincts newly returned to her, she began running before they did, every muscle and every limb protesting. Whereas once she’d been limbre, used to a life of hunting and fighting, everything felt weary with disuse and stiff with pain. Within moments she was out of breath and her chest hurt, and she let out a half hysterical laughing sob, because none of this should even be possible, and what a luxury it was to be complaining about pain after years of feeling nothing.

She didn’t know where she was going, only that it was away - away from the shadows and the things that lurked in them. She tripped and stumbled as the ground sloped up, crumbling in places and causing her to slip.

Part of her wanted to turn and fight the things behind her, just because she could. After being complacent, compliant, subservient for so long, the idea of going to a bloody violent death while screaming in the face of her tormentors held such an unfathomable appeal. But determination, new and ferocious, pushed her onward. She wasn’t about to die after finally being able to live again.

When she saw the light, she began sprinting towards it, finding a new well of power and strength within her. The ground continued sloping until it became impossibly steep. Running and climbing and eventually clawing her way up the endless mountain, she felt the tears on her cheeks and sweat on her brow. Dirt and blood caked under her fingernails as her hands clung on desperately and hauled herself up, muscles trembling.

She saw a figure at the crest. The woman in chantry clothing who she’d saved - well, she hoped she’d saved - from the Temple. She was desperately gesturing for Asha to reach her. “The demons!” she cried, her voice frantic.

 _Demons_? Asha didn’t dare look back to see what exactly was following her, or how many there were, but suddenly her lack of tranquility made sense. This green, shifting place must be somewhere in the Fade - although she was confused why it wasn’t taking on the semblance of a real place like it would in a dreamscape. She didn’t have much time to consider the ramifications of the fact that she was somehow here physically, never mind begin to unpick exactly how the Rite would react to her being in the place it was intended to completely sever her connection from. Perhaps the ritual magic had been overwhelmed by the Fade’s very literal proximity.

All questions for a mage or a philosopher who wasn’t apparently being chased down by demons. With a grunt, Asha hauled herself up onto the ledge with the other woman, heaving out breaths as her muscles screamed.

“We have to... keep running,” she groaned into the dirt, as the reedy old woman helped her up to her feet.

“The break in the world,” the woman said, pointing to a line of green light that gaped like a hole in fabric a short distance away. “It should take us home. Have you seen anyone else?”

 _Like who?_ Asha wondered - did this woman fancy meeting those soldiers or that monster again? She felt they had enough to worry about.

“No time!” she cried, grabbing the woman’s hand and dragging her towards the portal. She took about five steps before she froze, as a new thought gripped her.

_What if leaving this place meant she was tranquil again?_

“Hurry!” said the woman, tugging on her sleeve. The creeping, scuttling sound was far closer, but Asha was caught in the throes of the real question: whether she’d be better off dead, if the other option was becoming tranquil once more.

“Please,” said the woman, “we must go!”

 _Better off with a chance at life than none at all,_ Asha decided, and took off running again alongside the woman. It was easy to catch up as the woman was so elderly, but her moment’s hesitation had cost them ground. Asha practically felt the hot, fetid breath of the demons on her back as she picked up speed, the emerald slash of light filling up her vision.

A cry from the woman, and Asha was spinning to try and catch her around the waist, but she was too slow. All she managed to grab hold of was a hand, and she tightened her grip. The woman let out of a shriek of pain, and Asha saw a brief glimpse of the yawning maws of spiders behind her. But somehow, it wasn’t those spiders that she feared, but something else, something unseen in the dark, something that wanted this woman in the same way that monstrous man had wanted her - as something to burn away and use. “No!” she shouted.

She would not let this woman die. It had been her momentary fear that had cost them their head start.

Then, strangely, the woman’s fear evened out into a placid, resigned expression, and Asha properly looked at her face for the first time. She realised just how old this lady was, the lines that exhaustion and care had carved across her face, and given her silver eyes such a piercing, knowing look. “Go,” she murmured, and it was less of an order and more of a benediction.

“NO!” Asha repeated. “We’re almost there!”

But then an unseen force wrenched the woman away, and the momentum sent Asha tumbling, freefalling backwards through the portal. She felt herself fall into nothingness, and then crisp bright daylight rushed to meet her.

Asha Lavellan stumbled forward on shaky limbs. One minute she was falling, the next she’d landed on both feet, as if she’d simply hopped off a step. She had no idea where she was or how she’d gotten there, but found herself blinking at the brightness of her surroundings as an icy wind buffeted strands of hair around her face. The ground around her seemed empty and barren, although her vision danced when she tried to take more of it in. The last thing she could remember was that conversation with the Qunari guard, so she supposed she must have just drifted away from her body again. But then... where exactly was the Temple? She had to testify at the Conclave. Had she done that already?

The wind shot through her once more and she hunched over herself. _Fuck me, it's freezing_ , she thought, and when the thought popped into her head she froze. She shouldn’t be able to think like that. She didn’t have _opinions_ on things. She shouldn’t even be able to feel the cold, much less care.

She felt a pain in her side. She prodded it, and it worsened. The pain didn’t recede like it normally did when it threatened her calm equilibrium. She felt confusion, then fear, then realised she was feeling them. She let out a choked sound, halfway between gasp and sob.

Her hand burned. The pain of it was like an anchor, pinning her in her body like a butterfly trapped under glass. She took another two steps forward, and swayed.

Darkness had begun to bleed across her vision, making her cant to the side, and fear seized her. She tried to hold onto it, that impossible emotion. She’d forgotten what emotions felt like. Whatever lucidity she had in this moment, it would soon slip away, wouldn’t it? The numbness was creeping in, the veil of tranquility once more being pulled over her eyes.

A figure rushed up to her as she weaved drunkenly side to side. When she tried to look at their face, it made her dizzy and the person caught her as she swayed. “Don’t let it take me again,” she muttered, feeling the roughness of their shirt under her fingers as she gripped them like a vice. She was using all her strength, but somehow that didn’t seem to be very much at all. Gravity seemed desperate to make her body acquaint itself with the ground.

And then she realised, with a laugh, that the encroaching darkness wasn’t her tranquility reclaiming her.

She was just passing out after extreme pain and trauma, like a normal person.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No notes for this chapter, except that I plan to update this on weekends! :)


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas and the Inquisition's leadership desperately try to work out who exactly their prisoner is.

Solas left his patient in the dark, damp bowels of the dungeon - leaving some notes for Adan regarding the dosages of painkillers she required - and made his way upwards to the headquarters within the chantry. He didn’t much appreciate being summoned at a moment’s notice from his work, and from the woman who held his mark, by these people playing at being the Powers That Be, but that was the role he’d elected for himself, and so he must play it.

He wished he could stay and observe the patient for longer. She was an elven woman, small and gauntly thin, seemingly fragile to the point where he’d had genuine doubts as to whether she would ever wake and be able to bear the mark fully. It was partly why he’d decided to stay, vowing to stabilise her and bring her to consciousness. Initially, he had just wanted to see the mortal who had survived the release of the orb’s power and now somehow wielded it, to discover exactly who could cause his plan to go so wildly, terribly wrong. But seeing the tiny woman who had tossed and turned and murmured incoherently in pain, he was convinced that the prisoner was just an unwitting victim in a grander mistake - one that was his responsibility, that he would have to see amended.

However, although he knew the patient to be innocent, her behaviour was troubling him. In these few short days she had already been coaxed to half-consciousness. She’d awoken a few times, feverish and semi-coherent. In the first of these episodes she’d babbled about spiders and a glowing woman, and how much the world seemed to hurt and how bright the colours were...in a dark underground cell. The second she’d simply screamed until he had finally managed to sedate her. But this morning she had woken quietly - bleary eyed and too exhausted to raise her head when he touched the mark on her hand, bathing it to try and heal the inflamed flesh wounds that surrounded the anchor.

“Don’t take it from me,” she’d begged, looking at him with fever bright eyes. It had surprised him. For an irrational moment, he thought she knew who he was: that he was inadvertently responsible for giving her the mark in the first place, and assumed that he could somehow remove it. But her glassy expression had made it unlikely that she could even see him in that moment.

Which made such a plea even more bemusing. The mark was responsible for the extreme pain that made her moments of consciousness so very brief. She couldn’t know even half of its true power, so she had no real reason to want to endure such a thing for any longer than she should.

“But it’s hurting you,” he stated.

“You don’t understand!” she told him, desperation in her voice as she’d weakly tried to pull her hand out of his grasp and failed. “It’s what’s keeping me here. Please. I _have_ to keep it. I’ll be lost without it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I _need_ it,” she murmured to the air. “Creators, please don’t take it away…”

She’d lost consciousness after that, slipping back into uneasy, heavily-medicated dreams. He wanted to dismiss her words as the deranged mutterings of a very ill woman, but they were incongruous enough to intrigue him. Put simply, her defense of the mark made no sense. She’d only just received it, and her time with it had been mostly spent in unconsciousness. She could not be well acquainted with its magic, and was perhaps not even aware it had magical properties at all. Only he knew its true purpose, which was almost diametrically opposed to the one she was so fervently claiming it served.

Even more distressingly, such pronouncements did not exactly paint her in the best light. He knew she was innocent of the crimes of which she currently stood accused, but if she continued to insist that she needed the anchor for something, it would be hard to convince other people that she hadn’t actively sought to create it.

Falling out of the Breach laughing had not exactly helped to absolve her of this presumed culpability.

With a sigh, he walked upwards through the chantry’s underground levels and through the main hall to approach what had become known as the war room. Before, it had just been the Inquisition’s base of operations, overseeing Justinia’s Conclave, but since the rifts had begun forming and demons plagued them at all sides, “war” had become a necessary part of its title. He heard raised voices, terse with exhaustion, and waited a few moments before knocking and letting himself in.

The three leaders of Divine Justinia’s fledgling Inquisition - Cassandra Pentaghast, Cullen Rutherford, and Leliana… well, no one dared whisper of her last name, or even conjecture as to whether she had one - looked up at him as he entered. The two warriors were huddled over the crude map that they’d been able to find of Haven and the valley - the best that they could source, given the urgent circumstances - while Leliana stood to the side, scrutinising handfuls of documents.

“Solas. How does the prisoner fair?” Pentaghast asked imperiously, annoyance that Solas did not take personally lacing her tone. All three looked tired, and were strung taut with fear and anger at their current circumstances.

“She is stable, although in pain, Seeker,” Solas replied. “Some brief moments of waking, and a few words, though they made no sense.”

“Did she give a name yet?” Cullen asked.

“Or _anything_ that we might use to determine her identity,” Lelian added, her voice laced with quiet, brooding frustration. It was then that Solas realised one of the documents she was scrutinising was the census of Conclave delegates that had been salvaged from the rubble of the Temple. It was one he’d come to recognise by sight, because this must be the twentieth time in the last four days he’d seen the Nightingale combing through it for clues even her eyes couldn’t seem to find.

“No name.” Solas recalled their brief conversation, and selected which bits proved him honest but were not to the woman’s disadvantage, “the only clear words she said was that she’d be lost without the anchor.”

“So some kind of fanatic, then,” Cullen observed.

“Or a woman suffering from fever and recovering from extreme pain,” Solas countered blandly.

“It makes no sense!” Cassandra cried, and the other two winced, as if this was an old and well-worn complaint they’d begun to grow tired of. “There were elven mages at the Conclave, of course, but not many, and Galyan introduced me to most of the-”

Prolonged silence followed her grief stricken pause, as she noted the new sense of finality which surrounded her use of the past tense

“My agents marked brief notes on the appearance of every named delegate that went into the Temple,” Leliana said tersely, mostly to herself. “She matches none of the descriptions assigned to elven ambassadors. Barely any of them even had vallaslin.”

“A spy then?” Cullen asked, “the outcome of this meeting would affect all of Thedas. The Dalish have a stake in that future.”

“The spies _we saw enter_ were dwarven Carta,” Leliana said tersely, through gritted teeth. All of this sounded rehearsed to Solas’ ears, the dogged retreading of a repeated argument in the hope of gleaning more from it on a second, third, fourth glance.

“So she evaded your agents,” Cullen replied with equal frustration.

“That is _not possible_.”

“I can offer no clues to her identity other than that her markings relate to the goddess Mythal.” Solas offered, to provide some variety for their endless theorising. Some clans, he knew, might express a preference to a single member of the Pantheon, though it was not a particularly hard or fast rule. He had also chosen such an innocuous detail as a means of hiding the true knowledge he’d wanted to impart to the three of them. He’d decided on the walk up here that now was probably the time to release crucial information he’d held back until the point when opinions of the prisoner were tipping towards dire. 

“And...I have confirmed that the anchor is likely to close the breach.”

They all looked up at that. 

“It will, of course, require her to be conscious,” he continued, “and it will need testing before we try it against the main rift. But I hope she will waken in the next few days.”

“If she’ll even cooperate when she does,” Cassandra grinded out. 

_She has no reason not to,_ thought Solas. 

“I’m not even sure we’ll be able to hold out that long,” Cullen muttered, gesturing to the ever growing stacks of paper that had begun to pile up on every available surface. “The rifts come more and more frequently, and their territory expands. Can she not be woken now?”

“I’m doing everything I can,” Solas replied calmly, though his tone brokered no argument. “Consciousness will not come easily. She is in a great deal of pain.”

“Good.” Cassandra bit out angrily.

“You don’t mean that, Cassandra,” Leliana said in a deceptively mild tone, eyes never leaving their scrutiny of the manifest. Any hints of mercy were dispersed by the mercenary tone of her next statement, “If what Solas says is true, she might be the only answer to this mess.”

_There,_ Solas thought. In piquing the Nightingale’s interest further, he’d guaranteed the woman’s survival. At least for now. No one mistook Leliana’s calm demeanor for anything other than the deadly, silent wait of a predator waiting to pounce. Every time someone implied that the prisoner had someone eluded her agents, she bristled and lost her carefully cultivated composure in a way that belied her own anger and frustration. Leliana clearly hated that this situation involved _unknowns_ : she either had to admit her agents were somewhat fallible, or somewhat corrupted. If the prisoner - whoever she was - had truly eluded the Nightingale’s web of spies, then even what Solas knew of Leliana told him that she would keep the Prisoner alive for as long as it took to discover every one of the woman’s secrets. Beyond that, it was uncertain.

_The prisoner’s life is now in her own hands,_ Solas thought. Although he knew she had not created the Breach, he could not speak of how she had infiltrated the Conclave, or to the possibility of many other crimes.


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha wakes up in Haven.

When Asha had woken up and felt the blinding pain in her hand, she burst into tears.

_I’m still here._

She tried to stop her tears, initially, instinctively wanting to hide such a sign of weakness. But then she thought about it, all that roiling pain and injustice forcibly pushed far from her until she could no longer touch it, lurking under the surface, muffled by layers. And her at its centre, existing in a cage of silence, like the eye of a storm. So she let herself sob. Big, wracking sobs that shook her frame and made an ugly, wrenching sound deep in her chest. Just because sobbing was a thing she could now.

They were tears of relief.

Her guards probably misunderstood exactly what it was about her situation that caused her to cry. It was immediately obvious, once she took stock of her surroundings, that she was some kind of prisoner. She was in an underground cell, barely five foot by five foot, dank, dark and so damp it was slimy in places. It was uncomfortable and she was cold, her fingers so pale with the chill that there were lilac crescent moons underneath her fingernails.

And she knew that no one would understand how much she _relished_ these feelings of discomfort, after years of placid numbness. That single, awful cell bought her more joy than anything else in the past two years because it was the first time she’d experienced _anything_ fully in all that time. She rubbed her face against the coarse homespun blanket in her cot to roughly dry the tears from her face, inhaling its stale sterile smell, and pulled its threads loose with her fingertips. She traced the stonework with her fingers, seeking out those icky damp patches and the furry feel of lichen just because, in tranquility, she’d never really taken notice of texture. She lay on the floor staring at the way the green light of her left hand danced and made patterns like stars on the slick ceiling until she felt kinks and aches bloom across her spine, and then she smiled, because her body was so wholly _hers_.

She felt some fear about her situation, sure. Her hand burned with pain and pulsed with an unnatural light she didn’t remember being there before. She had no idea where she was or what was going on. But...it was hard to hold onto that emotion, when even just _having_ that emotion was a wonderful, beautiful novelty. She’d feel scared, and then her face would split into a massive, joyous grin because she _felt_ anything at all.

She also didn’t have much time for the novelty to begin wearing off. A few hours after her waking, crying, and relishing discomfort experienced with full consciousness, new guards came down and into her cell, engaged her wrists in heavy iron shackles,and dragged her upstairs in chains. The chains confused her, but she guessed someone - the Conclave? - had been waiting for her to wake up so they could talk to her - possibly about the slaughter of Clan Lavellan? She couldn’t really guess what else they’d want to talk about.

She tripped over her feet, struck then by worry that her testimony would be considered invalid now that she was somehow no longer tranquil.

 _The topic of conversation is probably going to be the painful glowing light on your hand, idiot,_ she reprimanded herself. She always heard logical recriminations of her own stupidity in the voice of her Keeper. It was drilled into her, destined to haunt her every bad decision, after years of magic lessons in which any reckless or incorrect move had earned a terse admonishment in that very specific tone of voice. It had nearly always been accompanied by the use of her full, ridiculously long name. It was the first time that she’d heard the echo of Keeper Deshanna since regaining her faculties, and that realisation was laced with sadness in the knowledge that she’d never hear the real thing again.

 _Creators, if I’m no longer tranquil... can I do magic again?_ The thought thrilled through her, lacing deliciously up her spine. Having that part of herself forcibly removed, in the moment, had felt less like losing a limb and more like losing a part of her soul, triggering the same feeling of grief and loss that had happened when members of her clan, her family, had been - well -

“Can you tell me where I’m going?” she asked one of her guards, a dark skinned human woman, to distract herself from the wave of memories that, once stifled, now threatened to burst over her at any moment.

“The Divine’s Right and Left Hands want to speak with you.” The guard replied in a severe tone that implied Asha was in some kind of trouble, and shouldn’t really be talking in the first place.

“Well, that’s a lot of words that I don’t understand,” Asha said cheerfully, too giddy at the idea of having human contact and her own voice to listen to the reproof in the guard’s words. _How can a hand speak to me?_ She wondered, imagining some elaborate ritual involving shadow puppets. Then she wondered if Divine Justinia was simply deaf, and the Chantry was just being obtuse about sign language. Again, no real fear seemed to touch her, because she’d freshly escaped from her own worst nightmare.

“Am I going outside? Is it raining? Where are we? What’s your name?”

The two guards shared an uncomfortable and slightly displeased look. _I’m being annoying,_ Asha thought. And then she remembered the constant need to be quiet and agreeable and to serve unobtrusively, and grinned again, _I can be annoying!_

“I’m not going to answer that,” the female guard muttered, looking resigned to the fact that she’d drawn the short straw by speaking first, and now had to put up with the prisoner.

“Not even to tell me your name?” Asha said innocently, batting her eyelashes, “That’s a bit rude. What are you hiding? I’m Asha Lavellan.”

Both guards froze, meaning the Asha bumped into both their shoulders, and the other guard almost tripped over their own feet. Asha frowned at them both, wondering what was wrong, but then they shared another one of those deep meaningful looks and resumed their walk, only this time they were moving quicker, and tugging her forward with some force.

“Please, just tell me one fact about yourself,” she said plaintively, desperate to keep her first real conversation going, or Dread Wolf take her, get it started, “favourite food? Favourite colour? Do you have any pets? You must have a horse or something. Do you have a horse?”

The woman glanced at her sidelong, with clear distrust. Apparently, her situation and reasons for questioning were far worse than she knew, if even questions about _pets_ were received with suspicion. But after looking at Asha’s face, the guard cleared her throat and, clearly flustered and fighting a blush, said with false gruffness, “I like the honey you can only get from my hometown. When it’s slathered on bread.”

Asha grinned at her in delight, showing all her teeth, “that sounds wonderful! Thank you for indulging my curiosity.”

“ _Maker_ , Brienne,” the other guard ground out as they reached the next floor of the building. There was daylight on this floor, and although the walls were old stone and they were clearly in some place of worship, it was somewhere Asha didn’t recognise, which meant she wasn’t in the temple anymore. That was confusing.

“What? Not exactly high-priority intel, is it?” Brienne snapped, and even Asha had the tact to let the rest of the journey carry on in silence.

They deposited her in a large chamber, leaving the shackles on and watching her as they backed away, like they weren’t sure quite what to make of her. There were four other guards in this room, and she was in the middle of them, plonked down on the cold, unyielding stone. She decided to ignore the swords they held drawn, because she was going to be sensible and not give them any reason to use them. Looking up, Asha smiled as she saw bright, buttery sunlight streaming from a small grate in the ceiling, illuminating the dust motes which danced in the air. She felt the slight kiss of warmth on her face and fought back another wave of tears. Well, it wasn’t exactly the best way to come to consciousness, but she decided she would definitely rather be imprisoned in a dungeon than in her own mind.

There was a flash and then a crackling sound, like something tearing or being wrent apart. “Ow!” Asha cried, as pain flared hot and bright in her hand. She tried to flex her fingers, shake it out as best she could, but it climbed and climbed, reaching a sharp peak that made her grit her teeth, sucking in deep breaths through her nose. “Fucking… _ow_!”

And then a door at the far side of the room burst open, with enough force to suggest it was kicked in. Two figures were silhouetted in the doorway - female, though Asha couldn’t make out their faces.

An imperious voice carried across the cold room, echoing across the stone: “Tell me why we shouldn’t kill you now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Four chapters and one title-drop in, and we finally reach the opening cut scene :') this does not bode well for my wordcount. At least it means there's lots of good stuff for me to look forward to!!
> 
> Notes: I decided to move the interrogation to an upstairs room in the Chantry because it'll make Asha walking outside all the more dramatic. No other reason, really.


	5. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha gets interrogated by two very attractive women, and has absolutely no idea what's going on.

“Tell me why we shouldn’t kill you now.”

Asha blinked in confusion as two women - two very threatening and very beautiful women, and oh wow it seemed like that symptom of tranquility was also leaving her because she was already blushing - advanced on her, looming over where she sat on the floor.

“Um, I’m not sure why you'd want to?” she squeaked without thinking. Creators, she always got so _awkward_ around attractive people. It had taken her first lover, a hunter called Mahanon, so long to realise she was interested in him because she’d always just blurted out random shit in panic whenever he’d come within five feet of her. It was only once they’d managed to carry on conversation beyond the thirty seconds her brain required to pick itself up of the floor from where it had apparently fallen entirely out of her head, that she’d managed to prove to him that she was actually quite witty, charming, and not entirely deranged.

It was at that moment in the tangent when her brain did exactly that, crawling its way back into position and beginning to realise the very real severity of her situation. _Wait, they want to...kill me?_

Why? She'd never seen either of them before in her life!

One of the women, with dark hair and some pretty overtly Andrastian armour, narrowed her eyes at her in utter disgust. “The Conclave is destroyed. Everyone who attended is dead. Except for _you_.”

“The Conclave…” Asha grasped onto the only words she fully understood as she blinked in confusion, before her eyes widened in horror. “Wait - what do you mean everyone is dead? That’s impossible! What about Miriam Trevelyan, she was with me, is she-”

“Dead.” The dark haired woman said with a cold finality. Asha felt a brief flash of grief. The woman had not exactly been a friend, because it wasn’t really possible for anyone to be friends with someone who was tranquil. Tranquil could express loyalty and fealty, but the capacity for emotional intimacy wasn't really there, and if it was, it wasn't like the people around them would ever try to elicit it. Looking briefly back over her memories, Asha could only remember being treated like a piece of furniture, a pet, or - at best - a very foolish child. And yes, looking back at the woman with newly conscious eyes, Asha had to admit that at times she’d been patronising and finicky, and possibly not the kind of person Asha would’ve been friends with even if she had all of her faculties.

But what Miri _had been_ was one of the kindest people Asha had encountered in her two years away, when she’d been in a position in which kindness rarely found her.

_And now I’ll never be able to thank her for it._

But dwelling on one loss meant that the unprocessed memories of others threatened to well up inside and overpower her. And there was no time to mourn when she was being accused of something terrible. “I don’t understand... you think _I’m_ responsible?”

“Explain _this!_ ” her interrogator darted forward, grabbing her wrist and making Asha grimace in pain as the glow flared painfully at the contact.

“Um. Well - ow! I...can’t”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“I don’t know what the fuck it is, or how it got there. I was hoping someone would be able to explain it to me!”

“You’re _lying_!” The woman rushed forward again, hand raised as if to strike. Asha braced herself for an impact, but it never came. The other woman, who’d watched the entire exchange silently, eyes never leaving Asha’s face, had suddenly stopped her companion, stepping between the two of them and placing a silent hand on the angry woman’s arm.

“We need her, Cassandra.” Her reminder was solemn and quiet, and the detachment in her voice was just as deadly as Cassandra’s fury.

“I’m not lying, I promise you!” Asha said desperately, “I just… I don’t understand. All those people... and Miri. They’re dead? How? There were hundreds of them, weren’t there? What about the Divine?”

Cassandra let out an animalistic snarl and tried to break out of Leliana’s grip, lunging forward once more. Her friend held her back resolutely as Asha held up her hands in desperate surrender. “Please! I _promise you_ I didn’t do anything. I _couldn’t_ have done anything. You have to believe me! If you could just let me explain-”

“You gave your name as Asha Lavellan,” the Orlesian woman interrupted her babbling with a steely glare, “you must understand, that name appears nowhere on the delegate manifest.”

Asha let out a bitter and slightly hysterical laugh, “check the evidence list.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not on the delegates list because I’m not - I mean, I wasn’t - a delegate.”

The other woman - Cassandra - froze, as her companion dropped her grip on her arm to turn fully towards Asha. Her scrutiny felt like a pointed weight, and the hatred in her eyes was unmistakable. But why? Asha was only telling the truth.

“We of course recognise the name you give as relating to the slaughter of Clan Lavellan. It was believed there were no survivors other than a single tranquil mage, now also lost in the explosion. I’m merely surprised that you would give the information so freely after so many years of hiding,” the woman narrowed her eyes to a poisonous glare, “Are you proud, then? Do you want recognition for what you’ve done, answering one act of mindless violence with another? Was this disaster all just some elaborate act of revenge, in the name of your people?”

“What? NO!” Asha said, appalled. “Whatever you think I did, I’m innocent. I’m _that mage_. The tranquil mage. I didn’t die in any explosion. That was me!”

“Yes, because you’re so clearly tranquil,” the Orlesian said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

“My brand isn’t on my face!” Asha replied hotly, embarrassment and shame rising red in her cheeks.

“More lies!” Cassandra spat. “We can trust _nothing_ that comes from her mouth.”

“I know it sounds impossible and _I don’t know what’s going on_ ,” Asha cried out, “All I know is that I arrived at the Conclave with Miri and I was tranquil and then I wake up with this mark on me and I can... feel again. I got myself back, somehow.”

She met the eyes of the two women, eyes pleading, “I’m so so sorry that... that all those people have died. But you must understand, I had nothing to do with it. Something weird is going on because I’m _different now_. The tranquility is gone. I know that it’s a miracle, _that it shouldn’t be possible…_ ”

She looked down at the ground and let out a small half chuckle, shaking her head. “And of course this salvation has come from bloodshed. The wrong done against me was born from bloodshed.” She sighed, “I’m getting really tired of this _sole survivor_ bullshit.”

The two women looked down on her, as if waiting for the facade to break. The silence stretched out, but there was some kind of reverent hush about it, the same kind you got when someone was telling a fantastical story that held everyone’s attention. Asha could tell that even the guards watching were hanging on every word.

“Do you remember what happened? How this began?” The Orlesian woman asked.

Asha eagerly jumped on the chance for an explanation with relief, “well, I arrived at the Conclave with Miri... the day before it started, I think? And a Qunari woman, she let us in and I remember her saying... that I was a bargaining chip. Invited solely to increase sympathy for the Mage Rebellion - creators, is there a Mage Rebellion? Is that a thing?” she stopped herself, as the events of the last two years that she’d watched with impartial detachment began to all click into place. She shook her head, pushed it down to deal with later. “And then things get hazy - which isn’t unusual! Most of being a tranquil is hazy, it’s like you’re walking through a watercolour, you’re never quite there and sometimes I can go away for hours... I mean, I _could_ go away for hours…

“And the next thing I remember is... the mark? I remember running. And just wanting to run - you understand, if I was tranquil, I wouldn’t have had that kind of self preservation instinct. Someone would’ve had to order me to move. Things were chasing me. And then - a woman?”

“A woman?”

“She reached out to me. I was scared, I thought the tranquility would come back to me if I left that place. But then. It didn't. And -”

Cassandra interrupted her abruptly. “We don’t have time for this. Go to the forward camp, Leliana. I will take her to the rift.”

There was a terse silence, as the Orlesian - Leliana - considered Cassandra’s statement. She clearly didn’t want to leave, and gave Asha a hard look. “Once more immediate problems are dealt with,” she said through gritted teeth, “we will question you further and we _will_ work on verifying your statement.”

“Please,” Asha asked, with a taut smile, “I’m as much invested in working out what’s happening as you.” She waved her shackled, glow-y left hand for emphasis.

Leliana’s look narrowed to a glare, and Asha felt fear in that moment, and not in a novel or enjoyable way. The Orlesian wore no visible weapons, but she could kill, that much was obvious from the way she held herself, and what Asha saw in her gaze. She turned, nodded to Cassandra, and then backed out of the room. Asha heard her barking orders on the other side of the door, though she could not make out the words.

“What is going on?” Asha asked nervously. Yes Leliana was terrifying, but she was pretty sure Cassandra had tried to hit her just moments ago. “How did the Conclave...how can all those people die? You mentioned an explosion? What’s a rift?”

Cassandra sighed heavily, shaking her head. “It will be easier to show you.”

Despite the situation, despite everything, Asha’s heart soared in her chest when she realised she was about to be led outside. The world lay beyond, and it would no longer be seen through a layer of frosted glass. She tried to keep her joy off her face, knowing how inappropriate it would be. Now that the happiness of being drawn back into herself was being forcibly worn away in favour of more practical matters, she knew she would have to tread carefully if she wanted to weather Cassandra and Leliana’s anger.

But the sunlight was so bright, and its warmth complemented by a brush of ice fresh breeze, and she wasn’t quite sure she succeeded in keeping the smile off her face.

She followed Cassandra into the sunlight, her eyes squinting against the bright haze. The sky was a churning kaleidoscope of colour that seemed familiar, somehow, though it was at its heart so utterly alien. For a breath or two, she thought she was imagining it, that it was just starburst imprints on her eyes from the sudden brightness. But then she blinked, and it didn’t go away. The sky seethed and pulsed with sickly green light.

“Well, fuck.” she commented articulately.

“We call it the Breach. It’s a massive rift into the world of demons that grows larger with each passing hour. It’s not the only such rift, just the largest. All were caused by the explosion at the Conclave.”

“That goes to the Fade?” Asha couldn’t hide the incredulous shock in her voice, and let out a low whistle, “that is one _powerful_ explosion.”

“Indeed. Unless we act, the breach may grow until it swallows the world.”

The hole in the sky pulsed with more unnatural colour. It made Asha feel woozy, like it might give her a headache if she looked at it too long. Suddenly there was a flare of light in that roiling cloud, and something _within her_ answered. She cried out, feeling her hand burn as she cradled it to her chest. It was stronger now, so hot and painful that she wondered if her skin was melting off the bones.

When she opened her eyes, she realised she’d fallen to her knees in the dirt. Cassandra was crouched down looking at her, and for the first time in their admittedly rocky acquaintance Asha thought she saw a degree of sympathy in her gaze, “Each time the Breach expands, your mark spreads… and it is killing you. It may be the key to stopping this but there isn’t much time.”

“The key? To what?” Asha looked down at her hand.

“Closing the Breach. Whether that’s possible is something we shall discover shortly. It is our only chance, however. And yours.”

“It’s linked to the Breach, somehow? But...but...that makes sense!” Asha cried, grabbing Cassandra’s arm before the woman returned to standing, and before she could think better of it, “don’t you see, if this mark, this thing...if it’s connected to the Fade - maybe it restored my connection! The one that tranquility severed!”

“So you _benefited_ from gaining the anchor?” Cassandra said, eyebrow raised.

“The anchor...you mean the mark? You think I did this? To myself?” Asha laughed, remembering the pain that had assailed her mere moments before, “you just told me it’s killing me.”

“And some would say death is preferable to being tranquil.”

“Oh, and _who_ says that, exactly?” Asha directed her gaze very pointedly to the religious symbol emblazoned on Cassandra’s chest, showing that she didn’t exactly think it was her. “I’d be inclined to agree with them, if it wasn’t for the fact that I find myself very much wanting to live.”

Cassandra sighed as she helped her up to standing, dropping her hand as soon as she was able. “You wish to prove your innocence? This is the only way.”

“I’m not doing the impossible and finding my way back to the world to have it end on me,” Asha told her, with utter sincerity that she could only hope the other woman believed. “I’ll do what I can to help.” she vowed, “Whatever it takes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My aim with this Inquisitor is to make her such a disaster bisexual that Hawke will immediately want to adopt her and take her back to Kirkwall :')
> 
> Notes: My take on tranquil brands is that they don't always have to be front and centre on the forehead, given that in Origins the tranquil you encounter in the Mage Tower don't have any visible marks. My version of the rite of tranquility is going to be pretty fast and loose as I can't seem to find many details about it in the lore, but I think that this one aspect does have canonical precedence! Maybe Kirkwall is just *particularly* sadistic about it?


	6. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha... 'fights' her way to the forward camp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: references to past physical abuse.

“Stay behind me!”

Asha watched - with not a little bit of fearful awe - as Cassandra drew her gleaming sword and shield and launched herself at the demon that had appeared in front of them. Asha was still on the ground where she’d fallen hard and gracelessly on her ass after the bridge had collapsed, and couldn’t help but gawp at the deadly elegance with which the other woman threw herself into immediately into battle.

 _If things go on like this, I might develop a crush._ There was a beautiful and impressive woman, and she had a sword. Asha was a simple girl of simple pleasures. She’d always had a thing for warrior types.

She hauled herself up, watching the fight with no real fear for Cassandra’s life. Yes, the demon was scary, but the way the other woman fought it suggested that such confrontations had become routine. She would just put her faith in Cassandra’s obvious warrior prowess and nothing could go wrong.

Of course, on that thought, a second demon appeared, and made a beeline right for her.

“Fuck!” Asha cursed, glancing around in a panic as the assailant caught her on the back foot. As the First, she had been more than capable of holding her own in battle, but that had been before tranquility. Now she had no weapons, and any muscles she could have laid claim to two years ago had long been lost, from the long periods of inactivity a tranquil life involved. No one had exactly ordered her to train or exercise while she’d been under their mastery. 

She surveyed the scene to desperately find something - a dagger? A sharp rock? - to defend herself with. That was when she saw the staff.

She froze. No, not really. It was more she... locked up? It was as if she felt the staff had eyes, and that it had noticed her... notice it back. It was watching, waiting to see what she would do next. A bittersweet pain swelled up in her chest, half fear, half hope. Her brand, hidden under her clothes, itched. 

So much of her tranquility - the parts that had made it an unbearable nightmare - had disappeared. It almost seemed too much to ask for its other effects to also be reversed. Magic had been a joy to have, but it was a luxury compared to the very real parts of her soul that she’d been forced to do without, that had now impossibly been returned to her. Asha didn’t dare ask too much of an already impossible thing, to receive a miracle and then offer up critiques. _I can live without magic,_ she told herself.

And then she heard the screech of the demon, and revised that statement a little in her head. Maybe she couldn’t live without it just _right now_. She lunged for the staff, grunting when she hefted the weight of it. She adjusted her grip, cursing the ache already in her arms, and moved into the form that most readily came to mind and muscle memory: a simple chained lightning spell.

Her staff slammed into the ground. Nothing happened.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” Asha muttered through gritted teeth. Ok, so maybe she did want her magic back. In fact, she missed it _very much_. But in that moment even she had felt the disconnect between her intent and the force needed to enact it, like launching into a song at full volume and finding your voice to be entirely in the wrong key. It was all very well to do a series of movements with a staff, but they meant nothing without mana readily feeding through them. And for her, the connection between the two had literally been blocked up like a dam. She needed something to clear away the stagnant detritus and reestablish the connection, to let the inconsistent drip return to full flow again.

Had it been a non-battle situation, she would’ve taken the time to centre herself, and gone deep into her consciousness to discover if the source of her power still existed within her. And if she had found that wellspring of magic, she would’ve taken careful time to reestablish its ties with her mind and her will, to fully align her magic with her being so that her willpower could seamlessly shape the world with all the ease of breathing.

However, the demon was almost upon her. So, with a shriek, she began beating it desperately with her big metal stick. 

Later, she would joke that even the shade felt embarrassed for her. Her swipes weren’t enough to kill or even subdue it, but it was kept at arm’s length long enough for Cassandra to come up behind it and start actually dealing fatal blows, skewering it through its shadowy, gaunt chest.

The warrior looked at her with a fiercely angry expression as the smoke of its form began to dissipate, clearly horrified that she’d bought an incompetent moron onto the battlefield with her. “I’m sorry! I can fight I promise!” Asha squeaked, “I’m just a little out of practice!”

“Drop. your. weapon.”

Asha stared at the other woman in disbelief, “Are..are you scared of me? I’m sorry - did we just witness the same battle?”

“Drop it. _Now_.”

“Ok, ok, have it your way,” Asha made a gesture of surrender, beginning to lower the staff to the ground, mumbling, “Next time we’re attacked I’ll try and hit it with my fists and it’ll probably go just as badly.”

“Wait.” Cassandra spoke just as Asha was about to drop her weapon. She seemed conflicted for a second, then cleared her throat, “I cannot protect you, and I cannot expect you to be defenceless.”

“I mean, you were doing very well at protecting me,” Asha observed, “literally doing the work of two women, even.”

And in that moment, Asha thought she saw the warrior struggle to keep a smile off her face. It flitted briefly across her scarred features. Cassandra succeeded in keeping herself stoic, or maybe Asha had just imagined her slip, as overall her demeanour stayed very serious as she said, “If you wish to keep the...staff, you may. I should remember that you agreed to come willingly.”

“Thank you,” Asha said, with sincerity, “I mean, I share your cynicism on the staff front, but thanks for trusting me.”

Cassandra made a noise that was something only slightly more elegant than a grunt, and they kept moving.

Three battles in, and she _still_ hadn’t managed to summon a spell. _What if I’m really broken?_ Asha wondered, winded and tired as she followed Cassandra up the stone steps of the winding path that was beginning to climb out of the valley floor. She knew that she was holding the other woman back, that her poor physical health and her giant-and-apparently-useless-fucking-stick were slowing them both down. _I should’ve searched around for a bow or something,_ she thought. She wasn't exceptionally talented at archery, but she’d had decent aim from years of hunting. Magic was all well and good, but no one wanted a lightning-fried piece of game as part of their meal - it had a weird tang to it. It would’ve at least been more useful than flailing around with what was essentially a fragile, blunt glaive.

“We’re getting close to the rift, you can hear the fighting,” Cassandra told her.

“Who’s fighting?”

“You’ll see soon, we must help them.”

“I mean, they’re not going to see me and turn on me are th-” but then there was a sharp right turn, and suddenly Asha was pitching forward, because Cassandra hadn’t felt inclined to warn her about the ledge.

She fell into battle, only managing to retain her footing by flailing forward a few steps. When she’d righted herself, Cassandra was already on one of the shades before them, slashing at it with determination. But Asha didn’t even raise her staff... she was too entranced by the massive green fracture in the air above where the fighting was taking place. It was strange and _beautiful,_ lines and fractals dancing through the air like seaweed drifting in the deep ocean.

She was still admiring it when the shade slashed her across the face. 

It hit her hard, with claws. She was forced back a few steps, skin burning, tasting blood from where she’d bitten her tongue with the impact. In moments the taste became stronger. She pressed her sleeve to her face, where she could feel the claw marks stinging, and it came back red.

“ _Fenedhis_.” she spat out on the ground as her vision doubled, trebled, before settling back to normal. She hadn’t been hit since-

_\- A memory hit her. It had been four months into tranquility, three before the mages at Ostwick found her. After the templars had left, she’d wandered listlessly away from the wreckage and through the forest. It had perhaps been weeks until she found a village, looking for someone to serve. She’d been lucky, in a way - the people she’d found hadn’t used her utter compliancy for anything deviant. She’d found an inn, and they’d just used her as a servant, getting her to do the worst jobs, like emptying latrines and dealing with mouldering food scraps, and cleaning up dirty, horrible rooms after rowdy misbehaving guests. But the younger man, the brother of a woman whose name she could not remember, had liked testing her limits. Getting her to pick up sharp objects by the pointy end, handing her things that were gross and rotting, cold enough to cling to the skin, or hot enough to burn. Even if it didn’t bother Asha personally, her body was still a body, would still have the most basic reactions to pain and harm. When she’d suddenly withdrawn her hand from a pot of boiling water he’d asked her to place it in, it had fallen off of where it simmered in the fire, and spilled onto his legs. It was his fault, technically: he hadn’t specifically ordered her to keep her hand in there for any prolonged period of time, just to fully submerge it to the wrist. As he surveyed his own scalded skin, he’d backhanded her into a corner, and kept hitting her. A week later, Asha had come back to herself and she was elsewhere, dumped in a straw-filled stable, left for dead._

The fear and the anger and the injustice she hadn’t been able to feel then welled up inside her with the swell of memory, burning its way across her skin like the shade had raked its claws across her once more. _Why?_ Why was this world so inherently violent and cruel? Maybe that was why being tranquil was so horrible - not because of what it made the victim into, but because of what it gave other people free license to do to them. It rendered someone so fundamentally weak and trusting, and that utter defencelessness rarely bought out a protective instinct in those who encountered it. Only when she had found the mages had she been shown kindness, and that was probably because they saw their own worst fate reflected in her.

 _Never again,_ she thought, _if no one else will look after me, I shall never let myself be powerless again._

Something flared inside her, a spark to bone dry tinder. Her magic didn’t feel like water, or any of that other beautiful imagery Deshanna had always waxed poetic about. It felt like _power_. Pure, unthinking and simple. Destruction, and heat. She slammed her staff upwards into the face of the shade, returning its blow, and a red-hot gout of flame shot straight through its head to leave a smoking hole.

“Fuck yeah!” she cried out in triumph as it dissolved, feeling her magic slide into place within her, nestling into the familiar space in her chest it used to reside in and begin to take root, intertwining with the very core of her. She spun, and sent another burst of fire at the shade with which Cassandra was engaged, aiming for its left shoulder and, by the Creators, actually hitting her mark. “Cassandra! It’s working again!” she said with a wild grin, waving her other hand to get her attention. Asha got one sideways glance from the woman, realised in the same moment that she was being utterly impractical in looking for praise, and instead started hitting all of the things.

She couldn't attack that nameless man from her past, but, well, there were plenty of demons on which to work out her issues, and her magic. 

She began the pattern of a more complex spell, and her magic flowed into the strands she was trying to weave, catching and curling up like dried kindling. She thrust down into the ground, and electricity simmered and raced along the stone, leaving branching scorch marks in its wake. There was a smell of burning in the air as the demons shuddered. Her soul sang. She was finally whole.

“May the Dread Wolf _fucking_ take you!” she cried, just for flare, a fiercely happy smile splitting her face. It had been a joke she’d made, with Mahanon, after they’d stopped seeing each other romantically but remained friends. They’d always come up with the most elaborate and impressive elegies to the gods for the most boring and mundane tasks, to keep things fun and interesting. It had always felt vaguely heretical, what with her being the First, to offer up Mythal’s name when they set up snares, or did the laundry, or just skimmed stones across a lake. This blasphemy wasn’t exactly colourful, but hey, these sayings had become staples for a reason. Traditions had to be honoured.

Now that she was actually of tangible use to the group, the shades quickly fell. There seemed to be another mage on the field, keeping up barriers on the warriors while they engaged. Asha had to admit she wasn’t feeling quite up for benevolent magic just yet, riding this wave of violent, righteous anger, and sanctioned destruction. She didn’t want to let go of her offensive spells - what if the power slipped away again once this emotion was bled dry?

Not that there was much risk of that. She had plenty of bottled up anger to explore.

“Quickly, before more come through!” the mage shouted suddenly, as Asha burned through another shade. He ran towards her, and Asha was about to ask him to perhaps elaborate on that instruction when he grabbed her marked hand and held it upwards towards the green rent in the sky.

“What the fuck are you - AGHH!” Asha cried as that awful tearing sound happened again and light arced from her mark to the tear in the world. There was pain, but this time, when it reached a level that she recognised to be the peak, it was suddenly gone, discharged into the air like lightning hitting the ground in a storm. Gasping, she watched and listened as the tearing became a _crumpling_ , and the rift in the air collapsed in on itself and winked out of existence.

She snatched her hand from the other mage as soon as it was over, clutching it to her chest and watching him warily. She noticed that he examined her with a similar interest, like a specimen under glass. “What did you do?” she asked.

“I did nothing. The credit is yours.”

“Fuck. Well. I’ll take your word for it.” She looked down at her hand, flexing her fingers. “I - the mark - the anchor, I mean, closed that thing? How?”

“Whatever magic opened the Breach in the sky also placed that mark upon your hand. I theorised the mark might be able to close the rifts -”

“Oh Creators be praised, you know about the anchor!” Asha interrupted him mid-sentence, stepping up to him without thinking. She stopped short of grabbing him by his tunic, but it was a close thing. “ _Tell. Me. Everything._ What is it? How did it happen? Do you think it's connected to the Fade? I think it might be a _part of the Fade_. That may be the only explanation for how it's managing to do all this for me... to me. Plus, it is _very green_ and these rifts and the Fade are also _very green_ …”

The mage blinked at her, nonplussed. “I beg your pardon?”

“The prisoner - that is, Asha - has offered an explanation as to why we were not able to identify her before now,” Cassandra stepped up to offer clarification, “she claims to be a tranquil mage who survived the massacre of a Dalish clan in the North-”

“Only as you can see, I am very much not tranquil,” Asha told the mage, gesturing vaguely at her face, her body, and then at her staff and the smouldering corpses of demons disintegrating into ash. “or at least, not since I got this anchor thing. It must’ve reestablished the connection with the Fade that was severed by the rite, somehow. I have my thoughts back, and my magic, apparently. I feel happiness and anger and pain and...I need to know how long this is going to last. Oh shit, will closing the Breach cut me off again?” She looked down at her hand, “If it’s part of the Fade itself, probably not. If it’s just a key, or whatever…”

The mage gave her what was meant to be a kindly look, but in actuality she could practically hear the cogs turning in his brain as he mulled over her words. “I... I don’t know. I would need time to think on it, time we unfortunately don’t have,” he admitted gently, after a few seconds, “all I theorized was that it would close the rifts. And I was correct.”

“Meaning it will close the breach,” Cassandra said.

“Possibly,” the mage turned back to Asha, “it seems you hold the key to our salvation.”

“Damn,” she replied, only half-joking as she stepped back out of his personal space, trying to hide her disappointment at his lack of answers. “And here I was hoping to be able to keep this piece of salvation all to myself.”

The mage gave her an odd look at that, but was prevented from talking further by another voice from behind Asha. ““Good to know! Here I thought we’d be ass-deep in demons forever.”

She turned to watch a handsome dwarf with one very cumbersome and very shiny, well-kept crossbow saunter up to the group. He grinned at her, “Varric Tethras: rogue, storyteller, and occasional unwelcome tagalong.”

That last one was with a wink at Cassandra. _Damn,_ Asha thought, _I wish I was that smooth. Although, admittedly, Cassandra looks kind of disgusted._

“Asha Lavellan: once tranquil, twice mage, and currently working very hard to avoid all those ass-deep demon futures,” she said, sticking out her non-glowing hand to shake, “that is a... really _pretty_ crossbow.”

“Ah, isn’t she? Bianca and I have been through a lot together.”

“But it’s - sorry, she’s - so clean. And _shiny_ ,” Asha said reverently, thinking back to her own worn-to-fuck scuffed staff from two years ago, which had had its own cool name, but no gold gilt edging to speak of. It had been so old that the places she’d gripped it had worn away to a different colour to the rest of the wood. Bianca showed no such wear.

“Ooh, I like you! You know a way to a man’s heart,” Varric clutched his chest dramatically, “now I see how you managed to worm your way out of shackles quicker than I did.”

“No worming involved. Only radical honesty.”

“A bold move. Should have spun a story.”

“Um, I’m think I’m going to stick with the ‘I’m a tranquil who somehow suddenly isn’t tranquil, but hey! I didn’t do it deliberately, and I can’t quite remember how that particular change came about…’”

“Ha, fair enough!” Varric grinned knowingly, “Well, keep the compliments coming, and Bianca will be great company for you in the valley.”

“Absolutely not!” Cassandra cut in, sounding scandalised, stepping in between her and the dwarf. Asha felt a smile begin to crawl onto her face as, even in the midst of all this violence, the two of them began to bicker. If Varric was once in shackles and was now fighting with Cassandra like they were an old married couple, maybe she wasn’t quite as close to the executioners’ block as she’d thought.

There was movement at her side, and she remembered the other mage was also there. He was pale, and solemn looking, with high cheekbones, and his eyes pierced into her like she was a problem he couldn't solve, which she supposed was true. “My name is Solas, if there are to be introductions. I’m pleased to see you still live.”

Varric leaned around Cassandra to say, “He means, ‘I kept that mark from killing you while you slept.'”

“It was killing me?” Asha stretched out her fingers in front of her and turned back to Solas, “I mean, Cassandra said that, but I’m finding it quite hard to see it as a threat when it’s the only thing keeping me anchored here. Ha, anchored!” she coughed awkwardly at her dumb joke, and tried to recapture her Serious Voice, “But I’m not exactly an expert like you - you seem to know a great deal about it all.”

Cassandra turned, “Like you, Solas is an apostate.”

“Technically, all mages are now apostates, Cassandra. M-”

“I meant to ask about that!” Asha interrupted without thinking, “is there _seriously_ a Mage Rebellion? My memories are only half there, and then they only make half sense. I mean, I know the Circles in the Free Marches were kind of fucked to all shit, that’s why the Templars were...well…” she shuddered, “on the loose? But it _can’t_ have spread this far beyond Kirkwall.”

Varric bodily winced, there was no other way to describe it. “You... can’t be serious?”

The three of her new companions shared a very weighted look, and then observed her in a very telling silence. 

“Tranquil don’t _exactly_ pay much attention to the world beyond the task they’re given,” Asha muttered defensively, hugging her shoulders. “...I guess there’s the Breach and the glow-y green apocalypse to worry about. I can have lessons in current events later. There are more pressing concerns…"

"Yeah, _that's_ a conversation I'd rather not have." Varric muttered, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Solas, you were talking about the anchor.”

“My travels have allowed me to learn much of the Fade, far beyond the experience of any Circle mage. I came to offer whatever help I can give with the Breach. If it is not closed, we are all doomed, regardless of origin.”

Asha couldn’t help but notice that that particular response had, well, fuck all to do with the anchor. Was he evading her questions, or just not as much an expert on it as he claimed? She didn’t think now was the right time to call him out on his evasive answers - she could sympathise with a mage being cryptic in an attempt to make himself seem more useful than he really was in the hope of not... incurring the kind of distrust and bad treatment most mages endured when they were no longer considered _useful_.

Still, she couldn’t quite hide her disappointment as she replied, “Well, that’s an eminently sensible way to view things. Lots of people would’ve just run as far as they could in the other direction.”

“You didn’t,” Solas observed with a wry smile.

“Yes well, if I can get out of this with most of my limbs and the full length of my emotional range, consider it an entirely selfish act. And on another selfish note, thanks for sticking around. The magic needed to keep this shitshow in check,” she raised the glowy monstrosity, “must’ve been pretty impressive.”

“Thank me if we manage to close the Breach without killing you in the process.”

She blinked at him, once, twice, waiting for the punchline. When one didn’t come, she clenched her glowing fist and raised it valiantly into the air, about to urge them forward, “and on that note…!”

“Cassandra, you should know: the magic involved here is unlike any I have ever seen,” Solas interrupted, before she could shout something cool, like EXCELSIOR! “Your prisoner is indeed a mage, but I already found it difficult to imagine any mage having such power. And if her claims of being tranquil are to be believed...”

“Hey! I’m stood right-”

“Understood.” Cassandra cut through Asha’s outrage, “We must get to the forward camp quickly.”

Varric cast her a sympathetic and rather amused glance, like he was trying to make her feel included in events. “Well, Bianca’s excited!”

“So _shiny_ …” Asha returned with mock reverence, and they continued on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this was a dumb way to end a chapter, what of it? (In my defence, I think this is my longest chapter yet...)
> 
> TW: discussions of rape/sexual assault
> 
> My aim with this fic is to write a tranquility story that doesn't include references to sexual abuse. While I know that's a big part of DA2 and definitely one of tranquility's most awful implications, I feel like the experience of being tranquil is an awful enough tragic backstory on its own without needing to include any sexual assault. So Asha's had a pretty shit two years, but they will not include any rape/sexual assault. This fic is enough of a minefield as it is without me also bringing in something I don't feel entirely comfortable exploring. 
> 
> TL;DR there is definitely be abuse in Asha's past but it will not be sexual in nature.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha chooses the most direct route to the Temple of Sacred Ashes.

If she’d thought the stares in Haven were uncomfortable, Asha was ready to crawl out of her skin under the weight of the soldiers’ gazes as she picked up health potions from a stack in the forward camp. These were the people who were actually having to fight the mess they thought she’d caused, who’d probably lost friends and colleagues to this disaster. There were so few of them, and those that remained were in bloodstained armour, some bandaged, and all with haggard expressions. She only had a few demon scratches and a magical hand cramp. 

It almost made her glad that there had been another rift for her to very obviously close at the entrance to earn some points in the “actually a good person” column. But that relief came with its own fresh wave of guilt. These rifts were ruining people’s lives. They weren’t just peformative good deeds to put to her name. To avoid thinking anymore, she chugged a potion with a grimace at its bitter taste, feeling the minor wounds the shade had left on her body begin to heal over.

Cassandra and Solas were striding on ahead, but Varric seemed to notice her awkwardness as she pinned her gaze to Cassandra’s back and tried to follow, seemingly unconcerned, through the minefield of accusatory gazes. He nudged her, making her startle slightly, “hey, don’t look guilty. That gives the game away. Imagine you’ve just slayed a dragon, or whatever Big Damn Heroes moment you need to get you through. Hawke used to do it all the time when she was wading through enemies. And she’d pissed off at least half of Kirkwall by the end.”

She offered a weak smile, not really having the heart to tell him that the only heroic thing she’d ever attempted to do in her life had resulted in her tranquil brand. 

She glimpsed Leliana up ahead, looking the same as she had in the interrogation room before, only now with a bow and quiver strapped to her back. She’d made the same treacherous journey up here, and had arrived seemingly untouched, without any injuries or even a rip in her pretty purple cloak. Asha couldn’t help but be impressed by such an understated demonstration of whatever skills she must have, and wondered how the red faced man in Chantry garb who was arguing with her had the balls to stand up to her at all.

Cassandra closed the space between them, leaning over and muttering something into Leliana’s ear. At her words, Leliana speared Asha with a calculating gaze that she couldn’t make sense of as she made her tentative approach up to the group. The woman’s words did not give anything away as she said, “You made it. Chancellor Roderick, this is–”

“I know who she is. As Grand Chancellor of the Chantry, I hereby order you to take this criminal to Val Royeaux to face execution.”

Asha froze where she stood, panic rooting her to the spot. _Val Royeaux._ That place would be _swarming_ with templars…

“Order me!” Cassandra’s anger shook her out of her encroaching shock, even more so when she realised it wasn’t directed at her, “You are a glorified clerk. A bureaucrat!”

“And you are a thug, but a thug who supposedly serves the Chantry!”

“We serve the Most Holy, Chancellor, as you well know.” Leliana addressed Roderick, but her gaze was pinned on Asha, as it always had been. Watching her every reaction. For signs of guilt, probably. Asha tried to remind herself that she had nothing to hide, but being around Leliana seemed to make you worry that she would find out secrets about you that you weren’t even aware you had.

“I-I’m here to stop the Breach,” Asha said shakily, folding her arms in front of her,“And I c-can’t do that from a prison cell.”

“You bought this on us in the first place!” the man said angrily.

“How, exactly?” she shot back, anger overriding self-preservation. “Please enlighten me on how exactly these events _which I am now trying to fix_ came to pass?”

He gave her a disgusted look before turning back to Cassandra, clearly thinking she wasn’t worth his time. “Call a retreat, Seeker. Our position is hopeless.”

“We can stop this before it’s too late.”

“How? You won’t survive long enough to reach the temple, even with all your soldiers.”

“You’re not even going to let us try?” Asha cried. Possibly a little too loud. Everyone, and she meant everyone, not just the people involved in this conversation, but the uniformed scouts all studiously pretending not to be listening, turned to look at her. _Don’t blush don’t blush don’t blush…._

Cassandra’s lips quirked, not in a smile, but in satisfaction. Asha had clearly proven herself in some way. “We must get to the temple,” the warrior insisted, “It’s the quickest route.”

Her and Leliana started talking then about a mountain pass, and distractions, and strategy, something Asha had to admit she’d never really given much thought to and, in this context, didn’t feel qualified to understand. She’d been in a position of leadership, certainly, but much better at handling social, economic, and political issues within her clan. As the First, she’d opted for the jobs that allowed her to interact with the community and keep peace among the families, and there were others who could trouble themselves with what defence and battle precisely entailed, should it ever occur. That had been part of the issue, really, when Keeper Deshanna had been struck down, and everyone had turned, terrified, to her-

Suddenly, there was another tug at her hand. Asha swore colourfully as the Breach above gave a pounding pulse that echoed through the valley, and her hand exploded in agony. Her back arched with the pain. She felt a cool, steady hand on her shoulder and could’ve cried when she felt Solas try to offer something of his magic to help quell its unending burn.

When she came back down from the agony’s unpleasant heights, she saw everyone watching her. “How do you think we should proceed?” Cassandra asked.

“You’re asking me?” she squeaked.

“You have the mark,” observed Solas, from his place at her shoulder.

“That’s not exactly _a military qualification!_ ”

“It means you are the one we must keep alive,” Cassandra said grimly. Asha could tell the warrior was thinking about how unreliable her powers had been when they had made their way up here. She was offering a chance for Asha to choose the mountain path, the route that would allow them more easily to avoid direct conflict, and was masking the decision as strategic consultation. “Since we cannot agree on our own…”

Asha swallowed, her mouth dry with nerves. If she was honest, she wanted to use the mountain pass. She knew how to fight but hadn’t done so in years, and feared what would happen amidst the violence with her so unpolished and uncoordinated. Looking at it logically, sneaking past was clearly the better option - it was what she was better at, and more comfortable doing, and it would practically guarantee her safety.

But it would take time. And - and - 

The idea of people sacrificing themselves to create a distraction for her was something she couldn’t stomach. Loyalty like that had to be earned through action and deed, not given to a stranger, and even then it was still a horrible thing to ask of anyone. She wasn’t going to let people die for the sake of her own incompetence and cowardice. Her heart lurched painfully just thinking about it.

Even if she closed the Breach, how could she face anyone after making such a decision? Logic wasn’t the only thing she answered to. She was not tranquil.

“I say we charge. We don’t have time to spare on stealth, and I won’t let other people give their lives in a battle I’m unwilling to face, just for the sake of a distraction,” she was surprised how these words did not come out shakey, instead filled with steely determination, like she actually knew what she was talking about. Not wanting to give them the wrong impression, she quickly backtracked, “That’s my thoughts on the matter, but you guys need to make the final call, quickly. Whatever happens," she flexed her burning hand, "it needs to happen soon.”

Cassandra smiled, and the next thing Asha knew, her orders were the ones being given to the troops among the camp.

Another fucking Fade rift. And another veritable fuck tonne of demons. At least this time, Asha didn’t gawk at the scene like a simpleton. 

_I can do this, I can do this._ She chanted in her head, as she ran forward and into the fray. The trek up the hill towards the sound of fighting, with all the remaining soldiers at her back. had given her the first full, prolonged jolt of adrenaline she’d felt since coming back to herself. The bursts of terror of finding herself in the brief demon altercations on their way through the valley had an entirely different flavour to walking into a battle she’d elected to stage, doubting her decision with every step. She’d forgotten how much you just wanted to go to the bathroom, when you were literally shit scared. 

It was that wave of elated terror, now allowed to finally break, that she rode as she flung herself in the direction of the first group of demons. She was gratified to see that she could indeed _do this_. Lightning sparked down her staff’s length and left the shades shuddering, paralysed as their bodies convulsed. She thwacked one and sent flames bursting through its chest. 

It almost didn’t feel like killing, not really. The things she was fighting didn’t have human faces. The battle didn’t feel like a battle, though she couldn’t work out if that was just the beginnings of shock settling in. 

She hated that detachment, _hated it_ with a passion. She fought it as it overwhelmed her, even as it made her actions more efficient and lightning quick. It felt too much like being tranquil, like being entirely separate from her body, floating away form where it was anchored in the blood and pain and fear. Instead, she focused on the one thing that reminded her that her hold on herself wasn’t slipping. She put more attention on her spells and the magic working through her than what she was directing them at. Every movement was edged with the panic that her magic might be snatched away from her at any moment, and every time it answered her call she felt safe and certain in what she was doing. That was how she would make it through this battle. 

She didn’t realise that she’d fully abandoned any semblance of strategy until she came back into herself to find that she’d been cornered, far away from the rest of the group. There was a flash of light that heralded Solas’ position, but it was too far away. She wasn’t barriered. Two shades were converging on her and, with an angry scream, she tried to target one with a shot of flame.

It was the first one, since regaining her powers, that missed. The ball of flame flew off above the tree line and dissipated in a puff of smoke when caught by the wind racing through the valley.

“ _Su an’banal i’ma_.” They were too close for chained lightning to be cast now, and still the shades advanced forward. Asha didn’t really have the forethought to fear for her life, but she knew that in a second she was going to be hurting _real bad_.

Suddenly there was a gleaming flash of metal, carving through the side of the demon she’d missed with the flame strike. It remained standing, but the soldier used its distraction to move into a defensive position in front of her. It wasn’t Cassandra, like Asha had initially expected it to be, but another warrior, with a helmet on, their armour red and gold. 

One of the shades let out its strange, hollow moan and brought both clawed hands crashing down upon them. The warrior only managed to deflect the blow by bringing their shield up over both of their heads, bracing themselves against the impact as Asha ducked behind their torso. The other shade was coming for their right side while Asha’s defender was occupied, but there wasn’t time to cast a spell. Instead, Asha jabbed it in its weird hollow eyes with the end of her staff, and let out a wordless, elated shout when she saw that those eyes... were in fact eyes. It howled and bought its claws up to its face in pain, apparently blinded.

“Maker help me, what are you doing?” the warrior grunted, in a male voice, as he tried to dislodge the shade bearing down on them.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, gimme a second, I’m really fucking rusty,” Asha would later consider that this had probably not been the most reassuring thing she could’ve said in the moment, but it was all she could manage as she frantically tried to weave enough magic together to form a barrier. The first one fizzled out before it had even fully formed as he pushed the shade off and away from his shield. “I’m really really sorry.” she muttered again.

The warrior grunted in a way that probably wasn’t trying to convey a compliment as he swung again at the shade, managing to run it through its chest. Asha gave another squeak as the second shade swiped wildly, blindly missing her as she dodged back a step. She would’ve taken that as a win, but she nearly tripped over the warrior as he also backed up from his kill. She banged heavily into him and almost sent them both sprawling. Although she knew there was no way she could hear it in the midst of battle, she thought she heard him let out a sigh, before he withdrew his sword from the shade’s corpse and started wailing on the other one. 

“Ok, so this is just embarrassing.” she grumbled. She closed her eyes, muttered a few words and suddenly white light flared. She let out a relieved, half hysterical laugh as a slightly discordant note filled the air, like a far off song, and the cool touch of her barrier encircled them both.

And then, before she had time to really feel pleased with herself, she was tugged unceremoniously to the ground, falling flat onto her back with a yelp.

When she opened her eyes, a grotesque green monstrosity stood over her, and she screamed. It looked like a massive insect, and just that very thought - the word _insect_ forming in her brain - made her skin crawl with the sensation of a thousand unseen feet. The monster opened its gaping mouth and met her scream with its own, the air around its head wavering with painful vibrations. She gasped and tried to right herself, fearing being pinned. The barrier had luckily protected her from any real pain, but her impact on the ground had knocked all the air out of her lungs and she didn’t have enough breath to form a spell. 

She pulled herself up, aware that the barrier - not a particularly stellar specimen, and in fact weak and waver-y as a newborn foal - was already dying. The warrior had also fallen with this demon’s arrival, though not as badly, and was pulling himself up to flank with it on the other side. But this demon, this thing, was twice his size!

 _I’ve got to help,_ Asha thought, and tried not to let that thought be born entirely out of her selfish pride and the need to prove herself to not be a complete burden. She didn’t have time to stand up and do a spell pattern, so she abandoned her staffwork, using it instead as a crutch to right herself as she extended her other hand outwards towards the monster and closed her fist, calling Winter’s Grasp with the first real breath she was able to fill her lungs with.

Ice raced up the demon’s carapace, like a spider web being spun in a matter of seconds. It’s scream was abruptly cut off as it froze, with its mouth gaping open in a silent image. 

Now was his chance! “Stab it! Stab it! _Stab it now!_ ” Asha cried out - helpfully? Desperately? Who was to say? 

Honestly, she just knew that time was absolutely of the essence - she had no idea if her command of winter would be as weak as her barrier had been, and she needed to make sure the creature was felled before the spell wore off.

The warrior, shockingly, didn’t need her prompting. His sword swung in a wide arc and cleaved the demon clean in two. Asha shielded her face as ice and frost-brittle flesh exploded outwards, the demon’s body shattering on impact. When it was clear that not enough of the demon remained to be a threat, she pulled herself fully up to standing so that she was face to face with the man who probably thought he’d saved her life, and was completely right. 

“Consider...it...stabbed,” his voice emanated from behind his helmet with an eerie calm, though his chest was heaving with exertion.

“Well, you didn’t actually…” even Asha had the sense to trail off before she finished that sentence, though she was already halfway through a mimicry of his cleaving motion before her tact caught up with her.

The way the man tensed made her wonder if he was about to also run her through. Which. Honestly. Fair enough.

“Asha, seal the rift!” came Solas’ urgent call from the centre of the fray that she’d so stupidly wandered away from. Asha span away from her rescuer and ran forward, anchor upraised. Corpses littered the ground and she vaulted over another the inert form of another insectoid demon, coming to a stop when she felt the hook in her skin that heralded the rift and mark connecting. Pain raced up her arm and she let out a wordless shout as it arced in a ray of light towards rift, closing it in seconds.

Then there was silence. Asha’s own breathing was loud in her ears, and she thudded her staff on the ground in front of her, leaning on it as she bent over, exhausted, and tried to catch her breath while staring at the ground.

“Sealed, as before,” Solas observed, “you are becoming quite proficient at this.”

“Yep! Proficient! That’s me!” Asha said, hearing the slightly shrill pitch of her own voice and wondering if anyone would judge her if legs gave out. “Can we have more rifts and less battles? Please?!”

“Unfortunately, it seems they are one and the same.” Solas replied with amusement.

“Let’s just hope it works on the big one,” said Varric.

“Lady Cassandra, the rift is sealed? Well done.”

Asha raised her gaze from where it had been trying to find solace from the floor. The speaker was the warrior who’d fought beside her - even she wasn’t going to have the cheek to say ‘with her’, considering that once more her usefulness in combat could be termed dubious. 

The man was removing his ichor stained helmet, to reveal a... well, a very, very beautiful face, with absolutely wonderful cheekbones, and hair the same gold as the helmet had been. _Oh Creators_ , she thought. Were people hired to fight this Breach based on their looks? Were demons somehow weakened when they went head-to-head with pretty people? Was that a vulnerability she’d never heard of?

She felt heat creep up her face, despite the shock and the fog of battle, mortification crashing over her in a wave, and she groaned aloud. Not only had she made a complete arse of herself, but she’d had the bad luck to do it in front of a _really hot person_? Why couldn’t she have embarrassed herself in front of a grizzled war veteran with one eye? Why couldn’t _she_ have a helmet, so that she at least stayed anonymous in her idiocy?

Then her own hotness levels would remain indeterminable, and all these beautiful people wouldn’t realise they were fighting alongside an incompetent trash genlock.

She realised she’d groaned aloud, and pinned her eyes back onto the very interesting stonework, hoping the sound could be interpreted as more exhaustion than utter embarrassment.

Cassandra, at least, had not seemed to notice, as she replied, “Do not congratulate me, Commander. This is the prisoner’s doing.”

 _Not helping, Cassandra_ , Asha thought, but met this Commander’s gaze when he turned his attention to her. “Is it?” he asked incredulously.

“A thoroughly legitimate question.” Asha replied without thinking, then clamped a hand over her mouth as if to shove the words back. She was supposed to be proving her usefulness so that she didn’t get murdered. She thought she heard Varric’s muffled laugh behind her.

Commander Pretty-Face did not betray any such amusement at her poor impulse control. “Yes, well, I hope they’re right about you,” he said coldly, “We’ve lost a lot of people getting you here.”

The words were an accusation, implicitly poking at all the doubts Asha herself had about her current situation. She didn’t blame his scepticism. She clearly wasn’t battle-hardened, and now she was making jokes about her own incompetence. Her deportment was, in a word, poor. He’d just watched her blunder across a battlefield and nearly get herself killed, after being told multiple times she was the only hope of fixing this crisis. And as she’d said herself, the anchor and its ability to close the rifts did not provide enough leeway to justify an utterly reckless lack of skill.

So, she felt she at least owed it to this man to stand up straight, putting her staff back on her back so that she could meet his eyes. “That’s why I didn’t want to waste any more lives on a distraction,” she told him honestly, “Thank you for covering my back there, I completely fucked up. I shouldn’t have let myself get separated from the group when I’m clearly the weakest here. You’re not the only one hoping that I’m worth all this…”

She gestured vaguely to the scene, and then noticed that two or three armoured bodies weren’t moving from their position on the ground. Suddenly, she didn’t feel like finishing that sentence. She swallowed and continued, “well, let’s just say I’m going to try my best to make it to the Breach, whatever the eventual outcome might be. Which means no more stupid decisions.”

“Yes, well, we’ll see,” said the Commander. He didn’t sound convinced.

“I would not trouble yourself,” Cassandra added brusquely, “you have dealt commendably with everything we’ve thrown at you.”

Asha snorted, “now I know what you sound like when you’re lying, “Lady Cassandra”. I was there when I beat that shade into submission like a scandalised Orlesian with a parasol. That wasn’t exactly one for the ballads.”

“You did _what_ -”

“The way to the Temple should be clear,” the Commander said, interrupting Varric’s startled exclamation. “Leliana will try to meet you there.”

“I’ll tell you all about it later, Varric, if we survive,” Asha said, trying not to think about any of the outcomes where that wasn’t the case. “We’d best move quickly now. And...if you forget all about me saying anything, that’s also completely fine.”

Cass cast a quick glance up the slope, towards their destination. “Give us time, Commander.”

The Commander nodded to Cass and then surveyed the group. Asha guessed that what he saw there didn’t exactly fill him with certainty, for he said in a half muttered prayer, “Maker watch over you – for all our sakes.”

As Varric began to ready a new crossbow bolt, and Cassandra stabbed her sword into the earth to clean thick, green ichor off the blade, Asha watched the Commander move away towards a wounded soldier. She was being lifted off the ground by another companion, who was struggling mostly because he also looked ready to collapse at any second. “Wait!” she said to Cass, who had started to move in the direction of the main rift, and ran over to the three of them.

“Here,” she said, and then there was an awkward ten seconds as the Commander watched her pat herself down and fumble through all her various pockets, until she found all four health potions she’d secreted on her person. “It’s not a lot,” she said apologetically, casting a sideways glance at the wounded soldiers, “but should make travelling to the forward camp easier? If you spread them around the group, maybe? Half each?”

“Don’t you need them?” the Commander asked incredulously.

 _Chances are I’m going to die, and that if I live I’ll be a shell again anyway_ , Asha thought. But that wasn’t the kind of thing you said to acquaintances, or witnesses to your humiliation, so instead she gave him the brightest smile she could and said, “Hey, I can cast barriers now! You were there! Who needs healing potions? I’ll be fine.” 

She dumped them unceremoniously into his arms before he had a chance to voice another protest, turned tail and started running back over to the main group who had begun making their ascent. She cast a brief glance over her shoulder and shouted, “Thank you again! Hope you don’t die!”

The group halted their progress and hung back as she sprinted up to them. Varric was watching her with a raised eyebrow as she finally caught up, “you seem to care a lot about Curly’s opinion of you.”

“What? No!” Asha lied, willing herself not to blush as she encouraged the four of them to pick up the pace, “I mean, he’s probably of the opinion that I’m an incompetent arse, so…”

“Ha! Look at your face,” the dwarf teased, grinning, “I was just going to comment about how well you’re doing at getting your judge, juror, and executioner on your side. You know, before your trial? What did you think I meant?”

“Absolutely nothing! Exactly what you said,” Asha replied quickly, waiting for the ground to swallow her whole. “But... wait - judge, jury, executioner? Which one’s he?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never been sadder that 'gremlins' are not a thing in the DA universe. 'Incompetent trash genlock' just does not have the same ring to it.


	8. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha closes the rift in the Temple of Sacred Ashes.

“Keep the sacrifice still.”

Asha almost tripped over her own feet when the word reverberated through the stone work. She _knew_ that voice. 

The breach was a riot of colour above her and her companions, illuminating the disembowelled Temple of Sacred Ashes as they made their hurried way down to the heart of the ruins. Chunks of broken age-old stonework littered the barren ground, that was laced underfoot with veins of red lyrium, and an unseen wind buffeted their hair and clothes, giving the place the feel of a desolate wasteland. The scale of the destruction here was terrifying, the sky above them discoloured, the purples and green of bruised, decaying flesh. It was also clearly the spot Asha had first stepped out of, although she’d been too overwhelmed with pain and the removal of her tranquility to notice any of its anomalies.

But that voice…

Another cry echoed out of the Breach and ricocheted around the half-formed walls. “Someone help me!”

“That is Divine Justinia’s voice!” Cassandra cried out, her voice pained. She began sprinting down the meandering path, as if she could chase down the phantom of the dead Divine by reaching the Breach first. _And the divine_ is _dead,_ Asha thought as she struggled to keep pace. Somehow, she knew that this chase wouldn’t end in the revelation that Justinia had somehow survived and wandered these ruins unseen by demons and soldiers in the week since the explosion. That was her voice, but it wasn’t _her voice_ , Asha knew that fact with an overwhelming sense of dread. Her memories were still a gaping hole, but the wreckage of this building was enough to know how this conversation, this script, ended... deep in her bones. 

She didn’t even notice when they reached the basin of the newly hollowed out temple, and fell over the lip of a drop that deposited her directly in front of the Breach.

“Someone help me!” the cry came again, high and shrill and loud here at the heart of the rift. Asha, from where she’d landed crouched in the dirt, cast a wary glance at Cassandra, who was looking around frantically for the source. She took a few steps forward towards the Seeker, reaching out to calm her and remind her of the real reason they were here, but then another voice joined the others, and caused her to freeze.

“I am here to assist you.”

Asha’s mouth went dry. That empty, hollow voice was like a nightmare, a dream she knew she’d had but of which she could not remember any specific details. Hearing the emotionless monotone bought all those details back in a rush. She remembered speaking in that voice. Hearing it was so familiar, and yet also felt so horribly, eerily alien, like hearing someone impersonate her almost flawlessly from a distance. Even when she’d been inside her body, she’d heard that voice with detachment, as if someone else was speaking for her from far away. To now actually hear it from afar, from outside herself, invited unpleasant and disconcerting cognitive dissonance.

Everyone in the Temple was looking at her, clearly recognising it too. She could feel their gazes, although she was still feeling sick from the shock of hearing the husk of her own voice echoed back at her. Cassandra was staring, wild-eyed and confused. “That was... that was your voice. Most Holy called out to you. But…”

Suddenly all four of them were thrust, bodily, into some kind of waking vision. Asha took in the scene: a woman who she thought must be the Divine wrapped in red tendrils of energy that seemed to leech at her skin. She was staring down some vast, impenetrable shadow with fear in her eyes. And then she saw herself, or what seemed to her like someone wearing a porcelain mask of her face: an impartial, empty version of her own identity, with glassy unseeing eyes, and a slack, bland expression like she’d been carved out of unfeeling marble-

Asha crouched in the dirt and scrunched her eyes closed for the rest of the vision, only allowing herself to listen to events as they unfolded. She couldn’t bear to look at what she’d been when tranquil.

She only knew it was over when Cassandra started violently shaking her, and she looked up into the woman’s tear stained face, “You _were_ there! Who attacked? And the Divine, is she…? Was this vision true? What are we seeing?”

“I don’t remember!” Asha shouted back. “Truly, I don’t.”

“These are just echoes of what happened here,” Solas told the other woman quietly, trying to calm her, “The Fade bleeds into this place.”

“Well, make it stop!” cried Asha, feeling sick. She didn’t want to be assailed by any more visions, or risk seeing that lifeless version of her face again.

“Only closing the Breach will do such a thing,” Solas said gently. Asha looked away from them all, not wanting to see pity in any of their eyes, and instead walked in a full circle around the breach as Solas began to explain to Cassandra exactly what closing the breach would entail.

 _Probably another boatload of demons_ , Asha thought, feeling tired to her bones. She didn’t need any kind of resident Fade Expert to tell her that.

The onslaught of demons felt endless. Asha was almost thankful that she’d chosen to battle her way to the temple, because otherwise she would’ve been completely unprepared for combat this intense. If she’d fumbled a barrier here, she would’ve been dead in seconds. She couldn’t put them up quick enough, flinging them at Cassandra and the other warriors as they engaged a hulking Pride Demon, who was fucking _immune_ to her electricity spells. All she wanted was to hit something and instead she'd been relegated to support, if they were to have any chance of surviving this encounter. Of course, she’d cursed her own wishes moments later when the other demons began pouring in, from the Breach and from the temple outside, as if they sensed that the Fade rift was under attack. Wave upon wave of shades demanded offensive spells as quickly as she could weave them. She was heaving with exhaustion, and her arm muscles ached every time she lifted the staff.

Creators, she was so out of practice. She could practically Keeper Deshanna’s sharp reprimands every time her form got sloppy - and it was _every. time._

Her marked hand was constantly crackling now, the pain setting her teeth on edge as the bones in her fingers and hands felt like they pulsed with it. It felt like they were being pushed further and further apart, warping until they no longer formed a hand. For the third time, Cassandra called out, “Quickly, disrupt the rift!”

For the third time, Asha ignored her.

Solas had explained, before she reopened the Breach, that interacting with the rift would leave the demons around it disoriented. He didn’t think short bursts would be enough to close it - that would require a more prolonged connection which she couldn’t attempt now unless she really felt like she wanted a quick demon mauling - and instead would only cause harm to the monsters.

But what if he was wrong?

Asha wasn’t ready to close the Breach yet. She wasn’t stupid - she knew it had to happen eventually, and that ‘eventually’ in this case meant ‘very soon’. No matter how much she feared for her own life, she wasn’t about to endanger millions for her sake. She wasn’t one of those people who was so selfish that they would rather be alive alone in the ashes of a broken world than leave it before they felt it was their time. The Breach had to be closed. She would not be alive in her newly conscious state for long if they remained ‘ass deep in demons’, as Varric had said. But there was a difference between knowing that theoretically, and actually doing it: closing the Breach and potentially cutting herself off from the Fade again. It was all very well to say you weren’t selfish, but then to actively work against your own self interest and consign yourself to a nightmare...

Would closing the Breach leave her tranquil again?

“Pay. Attention!” came a vehement shout shout from her left as an arrow speared through the head of a shade that had gotten entirely too close. Asha turned her head and saw Leliana spare her an acidly angry glare before she had her next arrow trained on another target. 

The woman was right. Asha threw herself back into the heat of battle with a renewed energy, not wanting to be any more of a weak link than she already was. She had felled the last of the shades when she smelt burning on the air, and suddenly her vision flashed bright and she screamed as three tendrils of electricity raked across her back. Maybe that was also her fault - she hadn’t noticed the Pride Demon’s advancing figure while fighting off the rest of the shades - but she had a wall on one side and it cast its net of energy so wide that she wasn’t sure how she could’ve avoided the blow even if she had noticed it coming. This wasn’t a case of incompetency, merely bad luck. The last remnants of Solas’ barrier dissolved on impact and her clothing charred as pain lanced across her vision.

Somehow, she remained standing, spinning another barrier and throwing it on herself even though the energy whip was already retreating. She dropped the staff, which had called to the energy like a lightning road. She was shuddering, her already exhausted muscles now contracting and spasming with the electrical discharge. She canted slightly to the side and caught the wall for support.

“Please!” cried Cassandra from somewhere outside her vision, “we need it vulnerable!”

Asha’s chest was heaving. No spells came immediately to her mind, which was still trying to process the blow. 

_You’re only delaying the inevitable,_ she thought. Even if the Breach didn’t close with this particular act, that was still her ultimate goal. She raised her hand to the massive rift in the sky, feeling another wave of dizziness as this time the arc of light between the anchor and the Breach felt twice, three times as strong, like two magnets flying at each other from opposite sides of a room. Her feet were pulled a few inches forward with the irresistible force of it, leaving lines in the dirt. It was... draining her. 

The Breach exploded outwards in a wide flowering prism of emerald light. The impact blew Asha’s hair from her face and, impossibly, bought the Pride demon to its knees in the dirt. The two of them recovered together, Asha pulling herself back up and slowly, painstakingly weaving another barrier with shaking fingers. Light fell like a waterfall over Cassandra as the woman ducked under the demon’s gigantic form until she was directly under its bowed chest, and then with her swordpoint she thrust...up…

Asha was worried that the demon would fall on the woman as it died, but instead, this close to a rift, its form began to dissolve into green light, its remnants being sucked back into the Breach’s vortex like dust on the wind. The temple fell silent as they watched it disappear, though they all knew that such a calm would be temporary. New demons would be on them in moments.

“Now! Seal the rift!” Cassandra turned to Asha, her gaze fierce with the heart of battle.

Asha froze instinctively. No. “It’s too soon,” she whispered, gazing at the scene around them in wide-eyed shock. How could it be over so quickly? She thought she had more time.

There was no way no one could hear her, but the fear must’ve been plain on her face. Varric made a step forward, as if to say something, but Cassandra shouted, “do it!”

It was like she was tranquil again. An order shouted, expected to be obeyed. Asha felt herself take two unsteady steps forward. Her hand hurt so much, and it was like some invisible force wanted her to raise it, beyond simply the finality of Cassandra’s command. It took more effort to keep it by her side, to fight against that pull of energy and connection. Everything around them seemed to have a vague sense of unreality, although that was probably the aftermath of the electric shock, or the adrenaline of battle wearing off or, well, just being in this close proximity to the Fade. But she couldn’t shake the fear that it was something more. Maybe she was already slipping away.

She cupped her aching hand to her chest, casting one final frightened glance at all of the eyes now rested on her expectantly. She came to rest on Cassandra, and said in a shaking, raised voice, so that everyone in the Temple could hear.

“Those friends of yours? The ones who say tranquility is better than death?” She held the Seeker’s gaze hard and direct, “they’re right. If this means...if the anchor… I mean, if I come back like that...I need you to promise to...”

The fierceness dropped from the other woman’s gaze almost as if she’d been slapped. She blinked, her face horrified. She’d clearly been so focused on their goal that she’d forgotten its potential consequences.

“Of course,” it was Leliana’s voice, cold and hard but filled with understanding, that answered her.

Asha let out a half-laugh, half-sob. Creators, she was taking up too much time - what if another round of demons fell upon them while she was dithering? She cast a quick glance at Solas from where he stood silently to the side, and her final words came out in a jumbled rush, “I mean, if you also happen to use all that fancy Fade expertise to find a way to replicate this so that there’s a permanent cure... keep me alive until then? Maybe? I don’t know. That’s a lot to ask. Sorry!”

And then, before she could make any more embarrassing speeches, she held her hand up to the Breach, and let go.

This time it was different, she told herself. She had agency. She had a choice - the chance, even, to make a decision - even if it was a terrible one.

Light streamed out of her hand, and she knew that whatever decision she had made, it was final. There was no way to stop the tide of energy rolling out of her now, even as it forced her to her knees.

She waited for something to change. For the anchor to dissolve as the Pride Demon had, as more and more energy raced out of it into the rift. She waited to feel different, for the first sign that the tranquility was coming back as the anchor emptied itself into the rift.

That waiting made her feel powerless. She was grateful when the darkness overtook her, and saved her from the fearful anticipation of her own demise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, writing this chapter: is this just all an elaborate way to justify why I never use the 'disrupt rifts' mechanic?


	9. Chapter Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha unwittingly finds herself as the Herald of a religious organisation, despite not believing in the Maker or Andraste.

Asha was dreaming.

She was in a forest. It was the kind of dreamscape that was devoid of anything but generic markers, so she could not name the place her memory was trying to recall. It was just densely packed, uneven lines of uniform trees, all unnaturally bright and vivid green. When she looked up, the thick canopy of branches wove together to form a roof: it could have just as easily been day as night.

She padded through it, wooden staff at her side. Her feet were bare, and she felt the soft and prickly sensation pine needles crushed underfoot. She didn’t know where she was going, only that her destination was up ahead.

She saw Mahanon and another hunter, a woman called Niamh, in the distance - glimpsing their pale figures through the trees. The figure of Mahanon raised his hand in greeting and, though she couldn’t quite make out his face, Asha felt herself smiling in answer to the grin she knew he’d have upon seeing her finally catch up to them.

 _But Mahanon can’t be there,_ she thought, with a sudden flash of clarity. _He’s dead._

It was that thought that made her realise that this couldn't be real, but it was the realisation she was dreaming that caused her to startle awake.

_I can still dream!!_

“Creators,” she whispered aloud, staring at the ceiling above where she lay as her heart raced, as if she'd woken from a nightmare. She clasped both hands over her mouth as she fought back tears, and then realised that her left hand still glowed green. She still bore the anchor, although the pain associated with it no longer felt like tearing and had instead faded to more of a dull, constant ache. Pulling her hand back and flexing her fingers, she saw that the mark seemed smaller than before, and the flesh around it less lividly red.

She was not tranquil. 

She was also... alone?

Asha swung her legs out the bed in which she lay, to find herself no longer dungeon-bound but instead in a small cottage that was simple enough to basically constitute just one large room. It wasn’t that much bigger than the cell, but infinitely more pleasant. Light filtered through the windows, and small gaps in the wood panelling, through which could be heard the hushed murmur of activity and conversation on the street outside. _I must still be in Haven,_ she thought, although it was not a part she had visited when being led out towards the Breach.

She was going to move to a window, to see exactly what was going on but - then she noticed the mirror.

She realised then that she had no idea what she looked like. It had been two years since she’d ever had inclination or desire to look at her reflection - tranquils did not exactly have the emotional range to indulge vanity. She’d seen her tranquil face in the Breach’s visions, sure, but she hadn’t looked long, and just thinking about that bland, indifferent version of herself made her skin crawl. That wasn’t really her. She moved over to look at herself - at her face when it was filled with life. The mirror was old and crude, warping and distorting a little at the edges, but she could make out her face in the dull reflection.

It still seemed odd, like she was looking at a stranger with her face, but in a much different way to when she’d been looking at her tranquil shell. It took her a few moments to process the accumulations of time she only half remembered, and how they’d changed her appearance. When the templars had attacked, she’d been 25. Her red hair had been short for practical purposes, and closely shaved at both sides - she claimed for the sake of her peripheral vision during hunts, but everyone had known that it was entirely because it made her look like a badass. It was those shorn sides that resulted in the ragged mop of hair she now had two years later - long and unkempt in the back, and then wild and tufty on either side, like fur in a cat’s ear.

She was also pale and gaunt under the black branching lines of her mythal vallaslin. She remembered when she’d completely panicked when asked about ink colours, and just chosen black because she figured it would match anything and everything she might ever wear. When she’d been tanned from the sun and consistently covered with more freckles than stars in the sky, it had been a good choice, almost like an official watermark on a page. But she’d spent a lot of the last few months inside, hidden in the buildings where the Ostwick mages had made their base and ordered to stay there because it was too difficult to babysit a tranquil on routine missions or excursions. So both her skin and freckles had faded out to opally white. No wonder everyone here had assumed she was a villain - she looked like she was auditioning for the Crows to become their latest edgy, shadowbound assassin. 

She looked tired, and older - although she supposed being an emotionless shell had been good at preventing wrinkles - and creators, she was _skinny_. The underfed kind of skinny, that made her wonder how she’d even been able to lift a mage staff in the first place. It seemed that tranquility had involved a life of relative subsistence, and she supposed she’d only ever felt hunger as a sense of necessity. A small breeze would just... snap her in half. It kind of horrified her. She’d gone through the leanness of winters in her time, but that always meant that in summer and during the harvest her clan had always tried to eat as much as possible to get fat on their bones for insulation during the colder months. She was just... so impractically tiny. _If I was on the road now, I'd never survive,_ she thought _I’ll need to fix that quickly_. She wouldn’t be able to rebuild her muscle without enough sustenance to do so.

But her eyes, though. She leant in closer to the mirror’s surface. Those were her eyes, cornflower blue and flecked with tiny patches of tawny brown. The main thing that had looked wrong in her tranquil face, but which stared back at her now with a feeling of utter rightness.

“Hi, you.” she whispered at the mirror, and then bodily cringed at her own lameness.

She was still examining herself when she heard a clatter behind her, and a startled cry. She turned to see a young elven girl, who’d clearly expected Asha to still be out cold on the bed. She wasn’t prepared for a walking and talking version, and looked a little panic stricken, “Oh! I didn’t know you were awake, I swear!”

“That’s fine…” Asha said awkwardly, and then noticed that the sound of her voice practically made the girl quiver with fear, “Why are you frightened? What happened?”

“Andraste be praised, you’re talking like normal…” the girl trailed off and fresh horror welled up in her face, “That’s wrong, isn’t it? I said the wrong thing.”

“I don’t think so–” Asha started, but then cut off her own sentence in equal horror when the girl fell to her knees in front of her.

“I beg your forgiveness and your blessing. I am but a humble servant.”

“I mean, I kind of assumed you were a servant but… please stop that. What’s going on? Am I still a prisoner?”

The girl didn’t stop grovelling, “You’re back in Haven, my lady. They say you saved us. The Breach stopped growing, just like the mark on your hand. It’s all anyone has talked about for the last three days!”

“I’m not a lady, my name’s Asha,” Asha took a step towards the girl to try and help her up, but it just seemed to make her quake more, so she thought better of it. What was going on? She’d just seen her face, she hadn’t seen anything particularly monstrous about it. “But if the danger is over... does that mean people are... happy with me? I’m no longer a suspect?”

“I- I’m only saying what I heard. I don’t mean anything by it. The Breach is still there but it’s because of you that we’re alive.”

“I mean, not really… What do you mean the Breach-”

But the girl was finally scrambling to her feet, cutting off Asha’s words. “I’m sure Lady Cassandra will want to know you’ve wakened. And that you’re...well, you are normal right? You’re not talking like you’re tranquil.”

“I’m not tranquil,” Asha said with certainty - perhaps the first time said anything with confidence in this entire meandering conversation.

“Andraste be praised,” the girl said. Again. Asha was beginning to feel incredibly uncomfortable with the religious fervour in her voice. “She said ‘at once’!”

“And...where is she?”

“In the Chantry with the Lord Chancellor. 'At once,’ she said!”

“And I can just-” but then the girl was running, the door banging loudly behind her in the wake of her harried escape, before swinging fully open on its hinges. _Well,_ Asha thought with no small degree of amusement at the sudden laxness of her security, _I’m definitely not a prisoner anymore._ Maybe she could just run away right now, out of Haven and far away. She remembered the endless green woods from her dreams with a pang of longing. She was in Ferelden... how many days travel was it to the Brecillian Forest? Were there still clans there? She thought she’d heard about them moving on, but maybe a few still lingered. It wouldn’t be the same but... Then again perhaps she could take her time finding other Dalish in Thedas. It would simply be nice to be in a forest again, to have some time to just exist with herself. To learn who she was, before she tried to fit that comfortably into another, foreign group of people.

Only, she couldn’t just leave. She looked down at the anchor on her hand. She’d always been a stickler for loose ends.

She picked up the box the servant girl had left and replaced all of its contents, placing it on the side for her to pick up later. She glanced once more at the mirror, considered doing something with her appearance, but decided it was a lost cause until she could find some kind of shears to hack away at that mop of hair. So instead she stepped out into the cold Haven air, which was infinitely more enjoyable without shackles or the fear of impending doom. Looking upwards, she saw with a sinking feeling in her stomach that the sky was still unnaturally bruise coloured and churning, though there seemed now to be no emerald green tear in it. That must've been the partial success the elven girl spoke of. She wondered what had happened to make things go wrong.

Though she was now free to walk the village, the journey up to where she thought the chantry was situated was still uncomfortable. It took only a few moments to figure out why. _Everyone_ was staring. At first Asha wondered if they still hated her - should she have asked for an escort? Maybe she could find Brienne, that honey-on-bread guard, again - but there wasn’t much hostility in their gaze now. And when she walked past, nearly all conversation fell silent, and remained so until she was long past.

 _Maybe they have as many misgivings about my hair as I do_ , she thought, fighting a smile.

That was when she heard the first whisper: “That’s her. That’s the Herald of Andraste. They said when she came out of the Fade, Andraste herself was watching over her.”

Asha was sure that she’d misheard, but the person who had said it was looking right at her as they lent down to the ear of their neighbour. Another whisper, from another direction: “She was tranquil, but Andraste herself blessed her. Saw her pure heart and undid the rite. Even her brand is gone.”

 _Ok, what the fuck?_ Her brand was _definitely_ still there. It itched under her clothes, a constant reminder of its existence that was, admittedly, probably half a product of her own imagination. But now that her magic was back, it took Asha only moments to sense its presence, a circle of numbness on her skin that her magic could not reach or touch, like an ice cold coin pressed into the skin. Whatever the anchor was doing to reforge her connection with the Fade, the tranquil brand was immune to its power.

But she supposed they all thought it was meant to be front and centre on her forehead, and this was how they made sense of its absence. Still, what had Andraste to do with any of this? 

She decided to try and ignore the whispers and stares, though she quickened her pace when she saw the glint of chantry stained glass further up the hill. It was when the salutes and the kneeling started that she couldn’t hide a shudder and took off at a near run up the hill and through the doors of the chantry. It was _creepy_.

Her entire journey through Haven was followed by that same silent awe and whispered reverence. She began to get a sense that something bigger, and kind of sinister, was at work here. They were building her up as this wonderful, blessed figure in their minds because that was the only way they could comprehend the fact that someone like her might have saved them. They were making her into a saviour because they didn’t believe that she - a mage, an elf - was personally capable of doing good on such a scale. It made her skin crawl. She couldn’t even bear to look at the chantry sisters that begin to bless her upon entering, her mind immediately going to the question of how they treated any other elf or mage they encountered. 

“Ew ew ew,” she whispered, grateful for the solemn hush of the empty chantry. Her skin felt dirty, like she wanted to douse herself in water to see if this newfound ‘holiness’ would come off.

The quiet didn’t last long though: Asha had made it barely ten steps into the chantry before she overheard another heated argument.

“Have you gone completely mad? She should be taken to Val Royeaux immediately, to be tried by whomever becomes Divine.”

 _Ugh, great._ Asha winced at the now familiar voice of Chancellor Roderick, coming from the room at the end of the chantry’s grand hallway. Though, to be fair, he at least didn’t sound like he thought she was some divine Herald. Maybe his openly hostile demeanor would be a refreshing change from her walk up here.

“I do not believe she is guilty.”

That was Cassandra. Asha fought the urge to cheer at the fact that she’d seemingly got the woman on her side.

“The elf failed, Seeker. The Breach is still in the sky. For all you know, she intended it this way.”

“I do not believe that.”

Asha wondered whether it was her good deeds, or her utter incompetence in performing them, that had convinced the Seeker of her innocence, as she reached the outside of the door. Should she enter feigning evil laughter, steepling her fingers like the villain Roderick considered her to be? Asha briefly considered it, but then figured it would be in bad taste. Instead, she awkwardly hung around outside listening to this argument near its conclusion, before knocking politely on the door.

In the answering silence, she let herself in, glancing warily around the room and taking note of the two armed guards also present in the room with Leliana, Roderick, and Cassandra. “I'm awake. You, um, wanted to see me?” she asked awkwardly, not sure whether to walk fully into the room.

“Chain her. I want her prepared for travel to the capital for trial.” 

“Disregard that, and leave us.”

Asha tried to stifle a surprised laugh at how quickly the two guards saluted Cassandra and left the room upon her brusque countering of Roderick's ordering. As it was, she still snorted when she saw the look of impotent anger on Roderick’s face upon finding himself left alone.

He glared at her as she tried to compose herself, before looking back at Cassandra, “You walk a dangerous line, Seeker.”

“The Breach is stable, but it is still a threat. I will not ignore it. Come in, Asha.”

“How can you still suspect me?” Asha asked the Chancellor as she closed the door behind her and folded her arms, not bothering to pretend she hadn't been eavesdropping on the conversation about her own guilt. “Genuinely? I did everything I could to close the Breach. If I was out cold for three days, it must’ve almost killed me.”

“Yet you live. A convenient result, insofar as you’re concerned.”

“I’m not exactly going to apologise for not being dead, asshole.”

Cassandra coughed. “Have a care, Chancellor,” she said, though her gaze flickered to include Asha as well, “Asha Lavellan is no longer a suspect, and the Breach is not the only threat we face.”

Leliana moved forward on silent feet, “Someone was behind the explosion at the Conclave. Someone Most Holy did not expect. Perhaps they died with the others – or have allies who yet live.”

Silence followed her not-so-subtle accusation. “ _I’m_ a suspect?” Roderick was aghast. Asha couldn’t exactly blame him - even she was surprised by such a turn in events. It was very rare that an elf got sided with against a chantry cleric. Besides, if incompetency was what was getting people absolved of murder charges, she would’ve suspected that the detestable man’s innocence had also been thoroughly proven.

Leliana shrugged, “You, and many others.”

“But not the prisoner.”

“Not a prisoner,” Asha interjected, holding up her wrists to demonstrate her lack of shackles.

“I heard the voices in the temple, including Asha's,” Cassandra said, conviction in her voice, “she was tranquil before the Breach appeared. The Divine called to her for help.”

“So her survival,” Roderick asked, “that thing on her hand – all a coincidence?”

“Providence,” replied Cassandra, “The Maker sent her to us in our darkest hour.”

 _Oh shit, not you too!_ “Wait, wait, wait... please don’t go painting me like I am some kind of ‘Chosen One’,” Asha said, panic in her voice, “you do realise I’m a mage. And an elf. A _Dalish_ elf? The Maker had nothing to do with this.”

For a second, Cassandra’s friendly demeanour shifted ever so slightly. It was only for a second but it was unmistakable, and watching it made Asha uncomfortable - it was the first thing that made her doubt the instinctual trust of the woman that had carried her through the events leading up to the closing of the Breach. “We are all subject to the will of the Maker, whether we wish it or not,” the woman told her, “No matter what you are, or what you believe, you are exactly what we needed when we needed it. And your own curse was lifted in order for you to answer that call - can you dismiss a miracle so easily?”

“If you follow that train of thought too far you’ll end up arguing that your god also needed my entire clan slaughtered and me tranquil to ensure I was in the right place at the right time,” retorted Asha, her voice growing cold. “I don’t think either of us want to dwell on the implications of that logic, or have that particular argument.”

She turned to Roderick, not wanting to see the Seeker’s reaction to her words in case it that ended in her potentially hating her. “This wasn’t about destiny, this was about me _not wanting the world to end_. Shockingly, I live in this world too, and have some stake in its wellbeing! A radical thought, I know!”

“The Breach remains and Asha’s mark is our only hope of closing it,” observed Leliana.

“This is not for you to decide.”

Only, apparently, it was. Cassandra brought out some ancient looking tome, and clearly it was important because it allowed her to make grandiose statements about ‘Inquisitions’ that made Roderick sputter in indignation. Asha was torn, as she watched the Seeker elucidate about ‘authority’ and ‘order’. She was glad when Roderick and his accusations were finally forced out of the room, turning his tail and running away from whatever divine right Cassandra had just invoked, but she still didn’t know how she felt about being left alone with those same two people, claiming some kind of holy power of governance. 

She didn’t belong in this room. That was the feeling that overtook her as Leliana began to speak.

“This was the Divine’s directive: Rebuild the Inquisition of old. Find those who will stand against the chaos," the woman smirked, "and how have no leader, no numbers, and no Chantry support.”

“We have no choice: We must act now. With you at our side.” Cassandra looked at her expectantly

“W-what is 'the Inquisition of old,’ exactly?” she said through numb lips, not moving away from her place at the wall. She tried to fight off the sensation of being cornered, as she pressed herself back into the wall and the shadows of the room.

The Templars who’d attacked her clan... they’d splintered off from the Chantry as well, hadn't they? All that holy fervour, searching hungrily for a just cause when there was nowhere official to direct it.

Leliana watched her. “It preceded the Chantry: People who banded together to restore order in a world gone mad.”

“After…” Cassandra hesitated, before forging on, “after their work was done, they laid down their banner and formed the Templar Order.”

Finally, powerless panic flared into action, became anger. Asha laughed, “oh, you’ve _got to be kidding me_ -” 

“But the Templars have now lost their way.” Cassandra continued, as if she’d anticipated Asha’s protests, “We need those who can do what must be done to be united under a single banner once more.”

“‘Those who can do what must be done…’ you realise that almost anything can be justified by those words, right?” Asha shook her head, “The way you’re talking... It's like you’re trying to start a holy war.”

“We are already at war.”

“ _I’m not!_ ” She protested shrilly.

“You are already involved,” Cassandra told her, “Its mark is upon you. As to whether to war is holy… that depends on what we discover.”

“I told you, I’m not some kind of Chosen One, not for my gods and certainly not for yours,” Asha replied angrily. “What if I refuse?”

“You can go, if you wish.” Leliana flicked a piece of dirt out from under a nail, seemingly unconcerned.

Cassandra sighed, “You should know that while some believe you chosen, many still think you guilty. The Inquisition can only protect you if you are with us.”

“Is that a _threat_?”

“We can also help you,” Leliana said it in such a tone of voice that Asha almost felt her stomach bottom out of her. It was like seeing a snare on the ground in front of you, knowing it was a trap, and then stepping into it anyway. Sure enough, moments later the Orlesian woman said in a voice of deadly feigned indifference, “although we are few, I do have the resources to, say, track down a marauding band of former Templars who splintered away from Kirkwall... at least, far more than one Dalish outcast attempting the same thing alone.”

“So now you’ll try to bribe me? Maybe I don’t want revenge.”

“I understand your misgivings,” Cassandra said, her voice kind, “it will not be easy if you stay, but you cannot pretend this has not changed you. With Solas in our ranks, we can study the anchor, see if we can find an explanation on how to make your tranquility permanent…”

“Well I’m sure if I just _pray to Andraste hard enough_ -”

“You need us,” said Leliana, cutting her off with a hard glare. “You’re an apostate, two years out of the world - if you are to be believed. Judging from the reports of your... conduct when closing the breach, you wouldn’t last a day on your own. The Inquisition offers you resources, protection, a roof over your head…”

“ _And_ ,” Cassandra continued, casting Leliana an exasperated glance, “we _are_ trying to stop the Breach and whatever caused all this. You might disagree with our methods, but as you said so yourself, you don’t want the world to end. We are the best equipped to stop that from happening. Why not join us, and protect Thedas?”

Asha swallowed her next angry retort, thinking back to that moment when she’d considered running away and just getting lost in a forest, and knowing deep down that she couldn’t. This was bigger than her: she’d seen the devastation the Breach had caused, and while she knew it wasn’t her fault, she had to admit she was uniquely capable of fixing it. Could she really live with the guilt of walking away?

And while Leliana was being kind of a bitch, Asha couldn’t blame her for appealing to her own sense of self preservation. Her grasp of magic was currently childlike, her body was weak, and she couldn’t guarantee her ability to keep herself safe if she set out on her own. What if the anchor sputtered and died, or her hand fell off in any number of ludicrous possible accidents, and she was out in the wilderness, tranquil again? No matter her misgivings about joining a fanatic Andrastian cult, she was pretty certain they’d at least honour her wish for death if the tranquility set in again.

The anchor pulsed in time with her own heartbeat, loud in her ears in the expectant silence.

“I’ll join,” she said quietly, not meeting either woman’s gaze. “For now. We’ll see how this goes.”

She could feel Leliana’s satisfied smile. “That is all we ask.”

 _Yeah, I’m sure it is,_ Asha thought bitterly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that we're out of the initial action I can start doing some more character building, woop!


	10. Chapter Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha practices magic and speaks with Solas.

It turned out that the fancy fat Inquisition tome gave its holder the right not to make one grandiose declaration of divine authority, but _several_. Over the course of many days. Clearly the decision that one held divine right of governance was not taken very seriously until you’d announced it, very loudly, to the same 150 people. Multiple times.

A crowd of Haven citizens parted as the Commander of the Inquisition forces, whom Asha had learnt was called Cullen Rutherford and who was also rumoured to be a _former fucking Templar_ , walked up the steps and began nailing a paper sign onto the door of Haven’s chantry. Clearly such things required an audience, and were important enough to draw the literal commander of the army away from training up his little _paramilitary organisation_.

Asha was not a part of his audience, using the distraction of the majority of the village to dart between two buildings without being recognised. Since being allowed to leave her sick bed, her priority had become taking great lengths to avoid any kind of Herald worship. She’d spent the last week resolutely avoiding involvement in the laboured process of the Inquisition’s establishment, instead opting to: 1. Give herself a haircut (she’d kept the unusually long length, deciding she liked it, but shaved away the tufty bits back into her trademark badass undercut); 2. Eat any and all food she could get her hands on (though she’d been disappointed to learn that rationing meant that there were none of the luxuries she truly missed available, like honeycomb and shortbread); 3. Learn the names of anyone and everyone in The Singing Maiden who would talk to her like she was a person and not some deity's avatar descended from the heavens (though she hadn’t dared get drunk yet and risk alienating them all with her singing voice or bad behaviour); and 4. Practice her magic, far away from anyone who would judge her abominably poor performance.

She’d briefly considered asking Solas for his help, but dismissed the thought quickly with mortification. From what Varric had described when she made a tentative inquiry, he was an incredibly precise theoretical mage for someone who had grown up outside a Circle. She didn’t want to mess up in front of him, or offer up any opportunity to be belittled or patronised. Besides, she didn’t need a teacher. The problem wasn’t that she didn’t know what she was doing, it was just that she was so phenomenally out of practice at doing it. Whatever pointers Solas and his bucketloads of Fade expertise could offer her, she was probably shouting it just as loud in her own head, in Keeper Deshanna’s voice.

Maybe when she could cast glyphs again without the fumbling dexterity of a seven year old, she’d start talking to Solas. She just didn’t want him thinking she was dumb, because she really, really wasn’t.

So while the Inquisition built itself from the foundations up, Asha left the boundaries of Haven, walking down into the valley to find a quiet spot to practice. She took her stolen, ungainly staff, and walked into fresh snowdrifts, making a beeline for the clearing that had become her only solace these last few days. Not for the first time, she imagined what would happen if she just kept going, walking further and further away from the village and into a world where she was not yet the newborn Herald of Andraste.

She knew she wouldn’t make it far, of course. A flare in her anchor would remind her guiltily of her duty. And besides, no matter how much she made a pretence of sneaking out of Haven, she was pretty sure Leliana - who was, it was becoming clear from the way Varric spoke of her, definitely some kind of long established spymaster - had agents on her trail wherever she went. Stopping briefly, Asha found an untouched pile of snow and drew a smiley face and a big arrow in the direction of her clearing with the butt of her staff, just for their benefit.

When she reached the clearing, she melted away the fresh snowfall, and then blasted the ground with another flashfire to bake and dry out the mud it left in its wake. Her training ground forged, she began to warm up and cycle through basic staff positions. Her arm muscles were tired and wrung out from the last three days of practice, but that initial weakness just made her all the more determined. She was grateful for the weight of her metal staff, because it would require her strength to improve more quickly. Once she’d built up muscle, she’d buy herself another wooden staff, and probably be twice as good at using it. 

She was still mad that tranquility had left her so very weak. She hated feeling powerless.

It was that feeling that meant destructive, offensive spells were coming to her with the familiarity of old friends. Her fire mines took a lot of deliberate concentration and lasted mere seconds before exploding indiscriminately, but they were there - she just needed to rebuild the stamina and concentration to cast them instinctively and hold them steady. Which meant she was starting to focus in on the defensive spells which continued to elude her grasp. She’d always been weaker with spirit and winter - when you had a name like ‘daughter of the storm’, you tended to cultivate a certain kind of image that had a lot to do with the tempest schools - but since reawakening she'd decided she would not tolerate any weakness at all. 

So she was casting barrier after barrier, working through the motions, trying to get them to last longer than a ripple on water. Once that depleted her mana five times over, she sat down, breathing heavily, recovering until she felt ready to continue. She spent the next hour trying to weave mines and hold them steady in her mind long enough for them to then also be dispelled. The mental exercise of holding the two spells concurrently in her mind - designed to strengthen willpower and make one critique one's own weaknesses in the very act of exploiting them - was one she’d mastered without difficulty at age fifteen. But now it eluded her.

“ _Pala adahl’en._ ” She swore colourfully, as her fire mine erupted upwards in a roaring momentary bonfire before she’d had a chance to cast dispel. Again. In a childish moment, she flung her staff away from her with a growl of frustration, but even that was depressingly unremarkable, because it only flew a few metres away due to the weakness of her stupid, flimsy paper-arms.

“Is something the matter?” came a calm voice from somewhere in the tree line, and Asha fought back another curse as she watched Solas walk into the clearing, hands clasped loosely behind his back.

“What are you doing here?” she asked petulantly, her embarrassment at having her failure witnessed transforming into annoyance. "This isn't really a spectator sport."

“I saw footprints leading through the snow,” he replied in the same mild tone as before, reaching down for Asha’s staff and handing it back to her without comment, “and also... a face?”

“I wanted to help my spies find me," she sighed, “I know the Inquisition is watching me.”

“And me as well,” he observed. Asha blinked. For a brief moment, she’d forgotten that other members of the Inquisition were also living on its outskirts, not as part of its gooey, fanatical centre. As an apostate mage who was only here because he was interested in the Breach, Solas was probably as much at the mercy of this Andrastian crusade stuff as she was. He might be more capable of leaving than her, but she couldn't imagine him being comfortable with any kind of holy war. 

Such thoughts were enough to make her remember her manners. “I’m sorry for snapping at you, Solas,” she sighed, “I am just... frustrated. At being trapped. At being powerless. At being so... fucking... useless…" she blinked, shaking her head, "And now I’m just bitching at you. Please ignore me.”

“You are far from being powerless or useless,” he cast a deliberate glance around the clearing, at the fire-baked earth and the multiple scorched portions where mines had flared up and exploded outward without her permission.

“Ah yes, as you can see, I’m a bastion of magical prowess and control,” she replied with lofty self-mockery, a self-deprecating smirk accompanying her theatrical gesture towards the wanton destruction. She sighed, “It’s _embarrassing_. I was the First of my clan, and believe it or not, I am actually quite a good mage. I was beginning to train in _Dirth'ena Enasalin_... I had the fancy glow-y sword and everything! After tranquility, I feel like a child who’s cast her first lightning bolt, and then decided to see what happens if she fires it at the nearest tree. Dangerous, and stupid.”

“You truly were tranquil, then?”

“What, you think this is all just an elaborate ruse to hide my true nature as bumbling, incompetent pyromaniac?”

“I merely admit to surprise, nothing more,” his mouth quirked in a smile, “you understand, the anchor is a uniquely unusual magic. The fact that it has also fastened onto someone with such an unusual set of circumstances…”

“You can’t help but wonder if this clusterfuck is more than outlandish coincidence.”

“Those are not the words I would’ve chosen.”

Asha grinned, “you shock me. Are you sure you’re not Dalish? Keeper Deshanna always said I required some much-needed lessons in solemnity if I was ever going to be taken seriously by Clan Lavellan.”

“You shock me,” Solas echoed the words back at her, his voice holding a teasing note, and she was startled into a laugh. _Maybe he’s not quite as serious as he appears,_ she thought, with approval.

Asha nodded over to the rock where she’d been sitting to take her breaks, and they made their way over. A half-filled waterskin sat next to it, which she picked up and downed, gulping thirstily to soothe her parched throat. It was then she realised that she was coated in a sheen of sweat, the back of her shirt clinging wetly to her spine, her face a crimson mess from the exertion and the cold. She contemplated it for a moment, then decided it didn’t matter - if he’d taken care of her when she was ill, she’d probably been all types of ugly then and this was nothing he wouldn't have seen before. “Yes, Solas, I was tranquil,” she said to him, sitting down with a tired groan. “I won’t tell you the details, because I’m pretty sure they’re already circulating as part of this whole ‘Herald of Andraste’ thing.”

“Ah, yes, I forgot I was addressing the Chosen of Andraste, the blessed hero who will save us all.”

“Yes, that’s me! Riding into battle on my shining steed! Exploding my elementary-level fire mines left, right, and centre!”

“I would’ve suggested a griffon, but sadly they’re extinct.”

“And scared of fire, undoubtedly.” She smiled, chugging some water hungrily and wiping her mouth, “suffice to say, life in tranquility has got rid of all my muscle, abolished half my muscle memory - the good half - and my magic feels like this unruly tangle, like a bear I’ve got to coax out of a cave after it’s been in hibernation. All the lessons are up here,” she pointed to her head, “but in practice…” she gestured to the clearing.

“Is there anything I might offer to you as aid?”

She smiled at him. “That's kind of you, but honestly?... No.” She shrugged good-naturedly, worried her glibness might cause offence, “half of my problem is frustration with myself, and the other half is mortification at having others witness my ineptitude. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t quite invite an audience to these catastrophic practices just yet. I’m sure your work with the anchor will be help enough.”

Solas examined her as she stretched out sore arm muscles, her joints crackling like timber. “It seems to me, if you are struggling from the issues you describe, that you are right to think your problems lie in your attitude, rather than with your magic itself.”

“Is this the part where you tell me that 'my own fear is holding me back'?” she raised an eyebrow at his startled expression, which confirmed that that was _exactly_ what he’d been about to say, “trust me, I know. Every time I cast and fail, I panic that the tranquility is coming back, or that it’s scarred me forever and I’ll never undo the harm done to my magic. And so the next spell comes out weaker, and then weaker still, and everything just spirals into uselessness. I think this is something I have to work through on my own, I’m afraid. I really do appreciate you talking to me, though.”

“I see those lessons in solemnity did happen at some point in your past.”

She snorted, “I have my moments. Wait here five minutes and I’ll be chucking my staff across the clearing again.”

“The contrast is... intriguing, I'll admit," Solas said wryly, "I’ve journeyed deep into the Fade and ancient ruins and battlefields, to see the dreams of lost civilisations. I’ve watched as hosts of spirits clash to reenact the bloody acts in ancient wars both famous and forgotten,” he cast a glance at her, “every great war has its heroes. I’m just curious to what kind you’ll be.”

“Ruins and battlefields?” she couldn’t help but sound impressed, and a little entranced at the dreaming tone his voice had taken on. Keeper Deshanna would’ve lapped it up - she’d loved to camp in old ruins and try to force Asha to meditate there until her butt went numb. “You’ll have to tell me about them sometime. But I hope it won't disappoint you to hear that I'm not gonna be joining any your fancy Fade legends anytime soon. I don't want to be a hero in a ‘great war’.”

“No?”

Asha sighed. She wondered if she was unburdening herself too much, and then decided that this was one of the most serious conversations she’d been able to have without someone popping in a ‘Herald of Andraste’ comment, and forged ahead. “The more I learn about the current state of the Templars and Mages, the more I realise I was just a casualty in one such ‘great war’," she used quotation marks this time, "Just a note in a ledger, collateral damage for those playing at being raging, formidable champions of their own personal causes, righting wrongs they think it's their job alone to fix,” she looked back at him, “you’ll forgive me if I try to avoid becoming another person who sees their personal glory as worth more than the lives of everyone else. I’m not with the Inquisition because I believe in their cause. I’m barely with the Inquisition at all.”

“You’re staying because of the mark?”

“Among other things,” she folded her legs up and hugged her arms around them, staring out into the distance, “I figure that I can help here, and I don’t really have anywhere else better to be. Plus I wouldn't put it past Leliana’s snipers to take me out if I get too far down the valley. Imaginary snipers, you understand - I haven’t actually seen any yet.”

“I’m sure,” he replied solemnly, causing her to snort again. “I will stay too, then. At least until the Breach is closed.”

“That was in doubt?” Asha couldn’t help her tone of relief. She was right in thinking of him as an ally, then. Or at least someone who shared in her reticence about how precisely things had escalated.

“I am an apostate surrounded by Chantry forces-”

“Tell me about it.”

“-and unlike you, I do not have a divine mark protecting me,” he shot her a sidelong glance, “Cassandra has been accommodating, but you understand my caution.”

Asha felt her heart lurch at having her own fears spoken by someone else who, she had to admit, was indeed in a worse position than even she was. She turned to him, leaning forward in a way that she hoped conveyed her sincerity, “You came here to help, Solas. I won’t let them use that against you. Against either of us.”

He regarded her with interest, “How would you stop them?”

“However I had to,” Asha fought to keep her face solemn, but then felt her lips twitch as she continued, “shining steed, elementary fire mines, and all. Hey! I might even throw my staff at them, if I think you're _really_ in danger. With my divine mark, Cassandra would have to consider me a formidable opponent.”

“A fearsome defender indeed,” he gave her a smile that held less humour and more sincerity than hers, “thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she grinned, hugging her knees closer from where she was balanced on the rock. “So, um... any other reason you were here? Other than to bear witness to my childish outburst and then listen to me bare my soul?”

He looked at her silently for a few moments, until she had to physically fight the urge to fidget. “Cassandra was looking for you,” he admitted, finally. “Apparently, the Inquisition is now in session, and your presence is required at its inaugural meeting. She has both Varric and I out looking for you, though I’m not sure if Varric was taking that duty very seriously.”

“Dread wolf take me,” she sighed, getting up of her rock, dusting herself down, and stretching out her spine so that every kink popped. “And here I was hoping that my status as symbolic figurehead would involve doing very little _actual_ work.” 

She picked up her water skin and her staff, and turned to grin at Solas where he was still sat, watching her in his strange quiet way. “Well, consider me found, and your duty fulfilled,” she said breezily, “I’ll tell Cassandra who to thank, and push you as far out of the ‘expendable’ column as I can." She paused, hesitant, before continuing, "And thank you, truly. I didn’t know how much I needed to talk.”

“The pleasure was mine.” he said, with the same placid smile, and ultimately unreadable expression.

“I’m sure,” she said, echoing his solemn tone with another grin. And then, because the silence got awkward, and she didn’t really know what to do, she joked, “You wanna walk back to Haven and hear more of my deep dark emotional secrets?”

“Tempting as the offer may be,” he replied dryly, “I think I shall stay out here, for now. I offered to collect supplies for Adan.”

“Sure thing." she fidgeted again, unsure how to close the conversation, before giving a lame salute, hand to temple, " _Dareth shiral._ ”

As she began her walk out of the clearing, she risked a quick glance back over her shoulder. Solas had not moved from his spot on the rock, and though his eyes were on her it was almost like he wasn't really seeing her. The look on his face told her he was far away, and full of some emotion she could not name - that kind of brooding, detached look that sages like Deshanna would've fucking loved, and had always lamented her own lack of ability to cultivate. _What a strange man,_ she thought, remembering how his unexpected ability to joke had startled a laugh out of her. Though he now seemed less severe than the picture Varric painted of an uptight, aloof academic - with what he'd kind of implied was stick up his ass - she left feeling like he’d learnt way more about her than she had of him. She supposed that she could maybe have asked some probing questions and gotten him to share a little more, but she wasn’t sure if Cassandra’s Inquisition meeting could be postponed for the length of another poetic monologue. 

There was plenty of time for that later. Feeling proud that she’d had her first full conversation without doing anything really stupid, she turned and made her way on aching legs back towards Haven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't added relationship tags to this work yet because these early chapters are still in full-on multishipper mode. Although I have a main pairing planned, if every member of the Inquisition is not madly in love with Asha by the end of this fic, I'm pretty certain I'm doing this wrong.
> 
> Elven is from Project Elvhen - "Pala adahl’en" means "go fuck a forest", and if that's not a line in Dragon Age 4 then I want my money back.


	11. Chapter Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cullen... says something stupid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: brief reference to past abuse

Asha figured that, although there were merits to getting to the chantry as quickly as possible, the presence of a less stinky Herald might be appreciated. “I’m going to get changed quickly!” she shouted into the empty air on the track that climbed up by Haven’s trebuchets, hoping that Leliana’s agents would overhear and carry the message back to their lord and master on her behalf.

She then jogged back to the cabin she’d moved her things into, to change into the less gross of her two newly acquired shirts. The only possessions she had were the ones Cassandra had requisitioned for her, and even though her bunk room was tiny, it felt larger and strangely hollow in its emptiness. She glanced at the untouched, unmade bed that took up the other half of the room as she tucked the hem of her shirt hurriedly into her breeches. She’d deliberately insisted on having no special treatment when Cassandra and her had discussed accommodation, but was yet to receive a roommate. She couldn’t work out if that was a deliberate decision, or if the Inquisition’s numbers were just that low at the moment. Or maybe they were going to be filled with the kind of religious fanatics Asha was trying very much to avoid. At this point, she thought she would’ve even taken a pilgrim. The emptiness made her uncomfortable - she’d spent a life in communal sleeping arrangements, and Haven was so very quiet at night.

But then, at least this meant no one was here to watch her change...

Cassandra was waiting for her at the door of the chantry, agitated and clearly unimpressed with Asha’s lateness. It was a look she recognised with perverse fondness from her time with Keeper Deshanna: the exact stink eye her petty teenage rebellions had received, informing her without words that her point had been made, and her motives were fully known. Asha had to admit that part of this delaying tactic had been out of spite, and she guessed that her pointed absence from the Inquisition’s initial growing pains had also been registered for the dissent it was.

“I promise you that I was just trying to look a little less gross,” she called out as she ascended the steps.

“Yes, we know.” Cassandra’s tone was arch, but not necessarily angry. The confirmation that they had scouts trailing her was totally a power play, though.

Asha followed the other woman silently into the chantry, past the paper sign declaring it the headquarters of the Inquisition. As if responding to her sense of dread, the anchor seemed to flare briefly, sending an aching pain up to her elbow. She looked down, wondering if it was just the work of her imagination.

“Does it trouble you?” Cassandra asked, sounding sincere.

“Not really,” Asha shrugged, shaking out the ache and popping the joint in her wrist, “I find its presence more reassuring than anything. I just wish I knew what it was, where it came from. Who gave it to me? I'd say to thank them, but they probably killed the Divine, so...”

Cassandra levelled an unimpressed gaze her way, “What’s important is that your mark is now stable, as is the Breach. You’ve given us time, and Solas believes that a second attempt might succeed – provided the mark has more power. The same level of power used to open the Breach in the first place. That is not easy to come by.”

Huh. It surprised Asha that Solas hadn’t mentioned any of that to her when they were talking. _Maybe he didn’t feel like bringing up my failure after I'd just been bitching to him about weaknesses._

“Couldn’t that kind of power just make the whole thing worse?” she asked, thinking of the flaring out-of-control fire mines that her wobbly excuse for willpower couldn’t yet sustain.

“And people call me a pessimist.”

“I guess I can’t help but think my luck regarding ‘brushes with powers I barely understand’ might have peaked early,” she waved her hand for emphasis, “it can only be downhill from here. I’m honestly surprised that you’d even consider giving a mage that kind of leeway.”

“That’s actually what we wanted to discuss with you.”

“‘We?’”

Cassandra opened the door to the War Room. Like the outside of Haven’s chantry, new Inquisition banners had been hung on the walls, and Asha noticed that the table in the centre of the room had been cleared of all its detritus and now had a large map stretched taut and pinned across its surface. Of more pressing importance were the three people in the room watching her and making no pretence of having not overheard her entire conversation with Cass. Two of them she recognised, and one she didn’t.

 _The Inquisition definitely has some kind of hotness quota,_ she thought, offering a tentative smile to the pretty woman with outlandish fashion sense stationed in the corner. _I wonder if they mention it on the new recruitment posters._

Cassandra closed the door behind them as they both entered. “You’ve met Commander Cullen, leader of the Inquisition’s forces.”

Asha eyed the Commander warily. She’d tried to ask Varric to confirm or deny the rumours that the man was a former templar, but the rogue had gone awkwardly and uncomfortably silent upon hearing the question. The man had fidgeted, and that didn’t seem like the kind of thing he was inclined to do very often, so Asha felt like that was telling enough. He’d refused to give any details, saying she should ask the man herself. So... he was definitely a former templar. _Should've guessed from the red and silver ensemble,_ she thought bitterly, as Cullen spoke up, oblivious. “It was only for a moment on the field,” she saw his lips twitch as they both remembered the details of the particular moment in question, “I’m pleased you survived.”

She just glared at him, feeling a cold form of satisfaction when the tentative smile on his face froze and slipped away completely. She briefly wondered if she was being harsh - maybe he’d left the Order as some kind of protest, or been kicked out for some act of subversive rebellion - but decided she couldn’t risk trusting him. _We are not friends,_ she thought vehemently. He might have seen her make a fool out of herself, but she would not allow any other show of weakness.

“I hope your men are ok, Commander,” she said, and she knew her first pointed use of formality would not go unnoticed by anyone in the room.

“Yes... they all made it to the forward camp without incident, if that’s what you’re asking?”

Cassandra cleared her throat awkwardly, continuing into the tense silence, “This is Lady Josephine Montilyet, our ambassador and chief diplomat.”

Asha’s heart lurched a little when the woman in gold gave the most adorable dimpled smile, “ _Andaran Atish'an_ , Ashatarsylnin.”

 _Oh gods, strike me down,_ Asha considered falling in love in that very moment, and felt her face split into a massive grin of its own accord, open show of distrust forgotten at the first time she’d heard her language spoken since waking. A beautiful woman, _and_ she speaks elven? She was shocked that even Solas had been beaten to that particular draw. “ _Ma nuvenin, lethallan,_ ” she replied, and when the woman - Josephine - looked vaguely panicked, she said, “you... do speak elven, right?”

Josephine sighed apologetically, “You’ve just heard the entirety of it, I’m afraid.”

“Oh,” Asha knew she must look a little crestfallen, but rallied quickly as she saw the diplomat blush endearingly and begin stuttering some kind of horrified apology, “that’s fine, that makes sense! I can always teach you more, if you’d like? You did get the stresses on my monster of a name a little skewed.”

“My apologies!”

“Oh gods, don’t worry! Blame my mother, and her flare for the dramatic! You know she named my sister Ellana? Just Ellana? I think my dad must’ve begged her not to add another member of the Elvhenan to the family,” Asha grinned, knowing she was babbling a little under the other woman’s warm and inviting gaze, but seemingly unable to stop. _There’s a reason she’s the diplomat,_ she thought, as she continued, “as much as I love the idea of being wreathed in lightning and calling tempests down from the sky, there’s a reason I’ve always gone by ‘Asha’. Even some of the Dalish struggled, honestly, and I knew an elder with seven-” 

Then a thought occurred to her, and she stopped mid-sentence to face the rest of the room, “if you all know my full name, I’m guessing that you’ve had my story corroborated in some way?”

Leliana stepped forward at that, because of course she did. “We recovered correspondence between Miriam Trevalyan and the mages of Redcliffe,” she admitted, leading Asha immediately to questions like ‘how?’ and ‘what the fuck?’. “They mention Trevalyan’s transportation of a tranquil elf named Ashatarsylnin Lavellan to the Conclave, one who matches your description.”

“Scrawny, underfed, and ginger?” 

“Trevalyan describes the colour and pattern of your vallaslin,” Leliana qualified with a smirk.

“Oh,” Asha placed her hand against her cheek, “that makes way more sense. So you believe me?”

“We have enough evidence to continue with. For now,” the woman said mysteriously.

Asha swallowed against a dry throat, meeting Leliana’s gaze. She’d been dreading having to say the next words, but also known it was precisely what she needed to do to finally put their suspicions to bed and secure her position in the Inquisition as quickly as possible. “I’ve got nothing to hide from you. I’ll show you my brand, if you want,” she offered in a level voice, before qualifying, “Just you, though.” 

Asha had the satisfaction of seeing that she’d genuinely surprised the woman before Leliana quickly composed herself. “You’d offer such a thing, unbidden?”

“Well, it’s the most obvious material proof of what I’ve been saying, so I was assuming you were going to want to confirm its existence at some point,” Asha tried for business-like brusqueness, even as her hands bunched at her sides and her palms began to sweat. She'd made the decision a few nights ago, and almost made her peace with the idea, but it was still somewhat terrifying. “I’d rather you didn’t send spies after me to do it. It’s private, and its visibility is something I’d like to have control over, so I’m not about to put it on display. Only one person gets to see it, and you’re not going to believe me unless that person is you. Plus, I figure that with you as my alibi, no one else is going to question my story even a little, ” Asha let the silence spin out for a couple of seconds before clarifying, “I mean, you are the spymaster, correct?”

Leliana raised a single eyebrow, “tactfully put. And tactically reasoned.”

“I mean, unless letters from Miriam Trevalyan just fall into your lap whenever you need them.”

The woman’s answering grin was deadly, “as good as.”

“So, why am I here?” Asha asked the room, wiping her clammy hands on her thighs, “I’ve already agreed to be part of your Inquisition and wave the anchor where it’s needed, but I don’t have an impressive title and gods know I don’t have an impressive skillset, at this particular moment in time. I’m not sure why I’m invited to your first meeting.”

“I mentioned that your mark needs more power to close the Breach for good,” Cassandra said.

“Yes,” Asha replied, “and... I’m guessing that Solas might perhaps have also theorised where exactly we’d get all this additional power from? But why do you need me?”

Leliana stepped forward, “we’ve decided to contact the Rebel Mages for help. The letters establish that they know who you are, and I’m pretty certain they’d be invested in aiding us in order to learn more about how the mark cured your tranquility-”

 _So you weren't even sure you believed my story, and yet you already have a plan in place for how to use it to your advantage._ Asha could not find it in herself to be surprised. That was basically what had happened with the Breach.

“And I still disagree,” Cullen interjected. He spared a glance at Asha, and fidgeted like he didn’t want to continue, before he pressed on in a rush, “I still believe... that the Templars could serve us just as well.”

Asha froze at the word. It was like her stomach was made of lead, and had just fallen clean out of her. In the moment between heartbeats, she felt an overwhelming urge to run, but the weight of that yawning pit within her meant that she was suddenly convinced she couldn’t move a muscle.

 _They had said this was an Inquisition matter, separate from everything else, even the Chantry hierarchy._ She thought, blood draining from her face. But _of course_ a religious war would mean templars. The two were inseparable, surely? There were already templars in the Inquisition's ranks, somehow considered trustworthy, even though she knew most of the Order was cutting a bloody path through Thedas even as they spoke. 

She’d been a fool to trust Cassandra’s words last time she was in the war room. The woman didn’t care about her welfare. Asha's heart began hammering in her chest, and she found that she had no measures in place to work out how to calm it. Suddenly the room felt small. _They want me trapped._

The debate raged on around her, though she could barely hear it:

“We need power, Commander. Enough magic poured into that mark–”

“Might destroy us all. Templars could suppress the breach, weaken it so–"

Weaken. _Suppress._ Asha felt the prickle on her spine, the sweat cold and slick on the back of her neck. Her skin burned like she could still feel the pressure of the hands that had grabbed her and forced her face into the dirt.

“Pure speculation.”

“I was a Templar. I know what they’re capable of.”

 _So do I,_ Asha thought quietly, wondering if she was about to be sick, right across the expanse of the Inquisition's brand new map table. She opened her mouth, and was pleased to find that she wasn’t. Her voice felt very far away as she said with a quiet, deadly calm, “This... is what you bought me here to discuss?” 

She'd barely pitched her voice above a whisper, but suddenly she felt all their eyes pinned on her. Gods only knew what they saw, but it was enough for Josephine to say, in a placating tone, “Lady Asha, do not worry, neither group will even speak to us yet-” 

At that tone, that 'come on, go quietly, accept what has to happen for the greater good' tone, a dam inside Asha broke. She felt her body whirl to face Cassandra, almost as if it was not her own. “You said the templars had ‘lost their way’!” she pointed a finger at the woman as she spat the words, her voice high and shrill.

“-lost their way?” Cullen actually had the gall to look somewhat hurt as he also turned to watch the Seeker.

“Now you’re asking me if I want to _work_ with them?”

“You see the rather obvious flaw in your plan now, Commander?” Leliana asked, in a very tired aside.

“That is not what we are asking, Asha,” Cassandra interrupted, placing her hands in front of her in an infuriating, calming gesture, “while Cullen has made his stance clear, we still believe that contacting the Rebel Mages is the correct route to take-”

“And I must respectfully disagree! We must consider the other options,” turning to Asha, Cullen said, “I, of course, understand that you will have your obvious misgivings...”

That was when the fury really began to build, “ _misgivings?!_ "

Both Leliana and Cassandra shared a weighted look.

“But you must see, logically, that the Rebel Mages also pose a threat if they are given access to the Breach,” he must’ve known he was straying into dangerous territory, for the Commander’s words were coming out in a rush, like he expected to be cut off at any moment, “we don’t even know who was responsible for the attack on the Conclave! Just letting the mages near the rift could actively cause us all harm! I believe that we must consider the Templar Order as an option when dealing with such dangerous magical phenomena- ”

He trailed off when he saw that Asha was shaking. Or at least, she thought she must be shaking, because her breath was coming very quickly and the world didn’t seem to be quite staying still. The room felt very dark, and even smaller than before, like the walls were contracting around her. Asha realised that she didn’t trust anyone that stood within it, not even Josephine with her smiles and the nice manner in which her lilting voice had danced along elven words.

How long would she have any control over this Inquisition, or even a say in her place within it? She was a fool to trust them, or think that the anchor would hold any sway over them. She should’ve just left when she had the chance. 

They all marked the change in her demeanor with worried expressions. Cassandra took a tentative step forward, “Herald-”

Anger and fear broke in a crashing tidal wave. “I am _not_ your Herald!” Asha shrieked, backing away from the woman like a startled, cornered animal, and hating herself for showing such weakness. She tried to stand straight, to not cower, but her chest hurt as she fought for some semblance of calm and spat out, in her closest approximation of a level voice, “but since you so kindly invited me to be a part of this _fascinating_ discussion, let me make one thing _crystal_ clear. If you put me within even five feet of fucking templar I will burn them into ash and _scatter them to the fucking wind_. And then I will take you precious anchor and your only hope of fixing this world, which is on _my_ hand, and I will fucking leave. Do you understand me!?” 

“The people who hurt you were _not_ Templars-”

“Commander!” Leliana’s voice cut through his like sharpened steel, forcing him into silence.

It was then that Asha realised that Cullen, this man who held the title of "former" templar, yet seemed so ready to leap to their defence... well, she would guess he was within five feet of her.

“How long since you left the Order, Commander?” she asked with deadly calm. She couldn’t look him in the eyes, but she could let her gaze burn holes in his forehead and achieve pretty much the same effect. It was a trick she’d learnt when she was younger, for facing down the things that scared her. “Where did you serve?” 

“Don’t answer that,” Leliana muttered quickly. Even Cassandra took a defensive step in front of him. Their body language meant that Asha knew she needed the answer.

“ _Where did you serve?!_ ” Asha shrieked again into the tense silence. It was the only tone of voice that seemed to get these people to listen to her.

Cullen’s shoulders slumped, and the breath stuttered out of him in one dejected, resigned sigh, like he knew the consequences of his answer were inevitable. “I left the Order two years ago,” he was staring at her, and she could see his hesitation, “when I resigned from my post as the... Knight Captain of Kirkwall.”

Something broke within the room, or maybe it was within Asha herself. Leliana let out a colourful string of Orlesian curses, but Asha didn’t hear it over the colossal roar of blood in her ears. In that moment, the world seemed to fall away, and she didn’t know what she would have to do in order to stay standing. Her mind became a blank canvas of instinctive fear. But clearly the Inquisition’s leaders had some ideas on her most likely course of action, because there was a scraping of metal as Cassandra began to reflexively draw her sword.

 _You could burn this whole place to the ground,_ came a voice into her head, quiet and unbidden. She felt, rather than saw, the candles on every surface, the one affixed to Josephine’s clipboard, gutter around her. She became immediately aware of every source of power in that room, including the moisture on every person’s breath, and the pounding force of her own blood just under the surface of her skin.

Only she couldn’t enact that kind of destruction, could she? Because her magic was still so pathetically weak.

Terror thrummed in her blood, which seemed, somehow, to sing. That was one way to not be weak.

It was so hard to breathe.

“I need to leave,” Asha said hoarsely, backing away and swallowing down what was now most definitely vomit. She thought she heard someone call out her name, but no one followed as she scrambled desperately out of the room, sprinting out past a group of worshippers and trying to will away that small voice in her head that told her she could make them all _scream_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Let's just bring in the templars, what could go wrong?" Oh, Cullen. 
> 
> I've always felt so fucking sorry for mages in this damn game. Regardless of origin (unless you play a Circle-loyalist Trevelyan I suppose) all mages in Inquisition are apostates, and then when they get spoken to in a war room context the first thing they get asked is 'are you down with the chantry who's teaching have been used to oppress you for centuries?' and the second thing is 'but have you ever considered... allying with the templars?' 
> 
> This entire chapter is born from fervent wish that there was a "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" dialogue option during this first advisor conversation. Even the most pro-mage Inquisitor in actual gameplay doesn't actually get to have that many moments of real resistance :(
> 
> Also, this is starting to pull in the stuff that Cassandra says when you ask her if she's going to use her knowledge about the Seekers and their cure for the rite of tranquility to start freeing tranquil mages. She says that she's worried that they'll be too "emotionally volatile". Which is a terribly weak excuse, Cassandra Pentaghast, but I've decided to turn it into a character plot point in my fic.


	12. Chapter Twelve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha needs some convincing to stay with the Inquisition.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: references to past abuse

The war room was silent in the wake of Asha’s departure, until Josephine let out a shaky, unmistakably relieved breath. Everyone had noticed the way that the candles had dipped low and the air had thrummed with a barely controlled energy, like an electrical current threatening to snap into the nearest body on its desperate journey into the ground. But the ambassador was the only one unused to experiencing the magical tension that surrounded a mage when they felt threatened.

The memory of the pale, terrified face of the Herald was something no one in the room could shake off, however. No matter how seasoned they were.

“Well, that could certainly have gone better,” Cassandra said with an enforced calm, hand leaving the pommel of her sword as it screeched back into its scabbard.

Leliana was the first to snap, wheeling on the Commander, “I told you, we would inform her of your background in our own time!”

“And clearly she would’ve appreciated the withholding of that information…”

“There is a thing in this world, Commander, known as delicacy!” Leliana cried. “Maker forbid that you should ever learn some!”

“Keeping this a secret was not the answer. She was going to find out eventually, and it was always going to go badly-”

“There is a difference between calmly conveying the information to her in a place where she feels safe and in control, and entreating her to side with her tormentors upon first meeting!”

“Her _tormentors!_ ”

“Yes, Commander! If our accounts of the Lavellan massacre are accurate, that is most certainly what the Order is to her,” Leliana’s fury was cold and precise as a knife edge, but then an uncharacteristic frustration broke through, “we wanted to make her feel welcome. We needed her cooperation in this. Maker preserve me, if you’ve lost us the Anchor…!”

“You think I deliberately did this? Do you think I liked the way she looked at me?”

“This isn’t about you!”

“And yet it’s somehow my fault?”

“We should go after her,” Josephine said quietly, cutting through her colleagues’ argument.

“No, she needs time alone,” Cassandra sighed, thinking back to the moment when she was sure she’d have to protect Cullen from some kind of attack, “we are lucky she even decided to run in the first place.”

“But she looked so _scared_ ,” Josephine said in a heartbroken whisper.

The room was silent again for a few long, drawn out seconds. 

“Why is she afraid of me, and not Cassandra?” Cullen asked quietly, fighting to keep his voice even. He knew it was pointless - the others would mark his struggle, because his powers of deception were no match for the perceptiveness of both Leliana and Josephine, and Cass knew him too well to be fooled. Reminders of the travesties of Kirkwall, and their monstrous repercussions that were still being felt like the aftershocks of an earthquake, would always weigh heavily on him, hitting him like a solid blow and forcing him back once more into that mire of doubt that dogged his every decision. 

He wondered what monster the Herald had seen before her when she’d looked at him. If she had glimpsed the image that sometimes plagued his own nightmares.

“I don’t think she knows precisely what my title as Seeker entails,” Cassandra admitted awkwardly. “It was one of the things we were going to discuss with her, once she felt settled, and we knew she wasn’t going to bolt.”

“And Cassandra is not from Kirkwall,” added Leliana, in that same unforgiving voice.

“How is that significant? I thought that the people responsible for the massacre had never been found?” Josephine asked. It was Josie who’d managed to get responses from her noble contacts in the Free Marches so quickly, compiling all the reports she could on the incident which had taken place on the outskirts of the Vimmark Mountains.

“They haven’t,” replied Leliana, “but the timing and location of the attack, coupled with some details of Asha’s testimony which Trevalyan included in her letters, hold significant correlation with the timeline we have for the Kirkwall Rebellion. It was just after Meredith’s death, Hawke’s disappearance, and the restoration of order to the city, but is estimated to have taken place either just before or during the subsequent dissolution of Ostwick’s and Starkhaven’s Circles, which would be the next closest locations for suspects. We are trying to get a hold of the employment records for all three, but who knows how many mages and templars simply fled Kirkwall during the unrest?”

Cullen was going paler and paler with every word the Nightingale spoke. “You must understand, whoever did this was definitely _not_ part of the Order.”

“Do you think that matters to her, Commander?” Leliana pinched the bridge of her nose, “as far as Asha is concerned, she watched a group of Templars murder her family and render her tranquil. As far as the _Dalish_ are concerned, all Templars are apostate hunters and more than happy to make their quarries tranquil without provocation. She will either think that those responsible did this under orders from Kirkwall, or they did it-”

“Because Kirkwall’s leadership failed to keep them in check,” Cullen slumped into a nearby chair with a sigh, and put his head in his hands, “perhaps she is right to hate me on sight.”

“Maybe we just don’t… mention the Templars in her presence? Ever again?” came a timidly sarcastic voice. It was about the closest they’d heard to Josephine being snide within the context of the war room, but then the woman immediately rallied and was back into her helpful, peacemaker persona. “I think this situation can still be salvaged. What happened here was because Asha feels like we do not value her contribution or her opinion on Inquisition matters, and thus have no reason not to simply lock her up at a moment’s notice and force her to comply with our wishes. She feels powerless. We must find her and explain everything to her, and then let her have a pivotal role and final say on such things. It gives her control, and allows her to secure her own safe place within the Inquisition.”

“I could try to find her?” Cassandra said tentatively, “but I feel like I am too close to this.”

“I will go,” Leliana said, in a tone that offered no room for argument.

She didn’t know where she was when she stopped running. She remembered Varric’s confused shout as she’d vaulted down from the Chantry square and predictably fallen hard on her knees, scrabbling up and continuing her escape. She also remembered the spray of vomit that she’d been unable to hold down being unceremoniously ejected onto the cobbles in front of Seggrit’s merchant stand. If it had happened to anyone but her, Asha would’ve relished the anger and disgust on the crotchety man’s face.

When she’d left the village and reached the edge of Haven’s lake, she’d waded in until the water reached her calves and then continued running along its outskirts, feet slipping on the pebbles and slimy sediment and legs feeling waterlogged and heavy as lead. She knew it was probably pointless to attempt to hide her tracks - she was sure that people were even watching her escape. But she couldn’t help but get a spiteful satisfaction out of imagining the moment of horror when the Inquisition would see her footprints disappear into the water, and then not reappear. When they might wonder, horrified, what exactly they’d made her do.

She kept travelling away from the village once she’d reached the far side of the lake, the miserable cold slowly bringing her back into herself. She couldn’t run for long, but she put as much distance between them and her as possible over the next few hours, trudging relentlessly and blindly through thick, frost crusted trees that all, ultimately, looked the same.

Now she was stood in the depths of the valley, her breath a heavy cloud in the air. It was late afternoon, and the light was golden as the shadows of trees began to elongate round her. Her still-damp boots squelched when she walked. She didn’t quite trust herself to use any fire to dry herself out - her control over her magic felt shaky and uncertain, with that burning, terrible rage still simmering just under the surface.

Had that voice in her head been a demon? She didn’t think so, but the fact that her own mind had pivoted immediately towards furious thoughts of destruction, indistinguishable from a demon’s siren song, did not exactly bring Asha comfort. 

She’d never felt her blood like magical potential before, not even for a second. Even when the Templars had borne down upon her, and spat “blood mage” into her face. Or when she’d struggled in her restraints and wondered if she had anything to lose by becoming what they called her. The earth beneath her had been so blood logged, the corpses of her clan cooling around her, that she’d thought, _I won’t even have to cut myself to do it._

Nothing had answered her in those moments of desperate doubt, but maybe she hadn’t even known true fear then. Not like she knew it now. At the thought of Kirkwall Templars, she shuddered and cast a glance back at Haven. Only she wasn’t sure that Haven was even in that direction anymore, lost as she was among the trees.

It didn’t matter anymore. She was a mage, and she’d almost struck down one of the leaders of the Inquisition. They would’ve seen how out-of-control she was, that moment of weakness within her. Such weakness would be her condemnation, perhaps even enough to justify making her tranquil again, if such a thing were possible. Maybe they would just kill her. With a Templar in their ranks, they would never trust her again. She had just gotten herself labelled as a dangerous apostate.

 _Was_ she a dangerous apostate?

When she had spoken with other clans’ Keepers and elders and firsts, she’d met people who’d had experiences similar to what the Circles called a Harrowing - demons that came to tempt you in the fadescape of dreams, with promises of power dressed up in a variety of pretty guises. She couldn’t remember ever having one herself, which meant that she’d never had the subsequent... moment of refusal. 

But that had never made her feel dangerous. Not before now. Now everything felt so uncertain. Her emotions... well, even she didn’t fully understand them. Everything was still so overwhelming after years of muffled silence. How could she flicker so quickly between happiness, terror, panic, and rage?

 _I can’t go back,_ she thought. But then, she’d also literally left everything she owned, including her staff, back in Haven. Like an idiot. Like she didn’t really want to run.

But she had to leave now, right? She didn’t want to work with them and they wouldn’t want to work with her.

In the end, some unnameable force meant that she ceased her directionless wandering and came to a stop. It was an accumulation of many things - mostly exhaustion, given that she had been training for hours before that brief, disastrous meeting in the chantry. She was uncertain, and cold, and part of her was worried that she hadn’t gotten far from Haven at all, and that this would all look like some childish tantrum once the Inquisition’s forces caught up with her. 

That thought meant that she’d already decided she planned on returning. 

By the light of the anchor, she picked up armfuls of twigs and branches from the forest floor and then, with only a brief moment of hesitation, used her magic to light a campfire that would announce her position to any Inquisition scouts on her trail. As the night began to creep in around her, Asha huddled close to the warmth and hoped they would find her before any wild animals did.

When an hour or so later she heard the crush of deadfall underfoot, she was surprised to find that the footsteps did not belong to some nameless underling ordered to seek her out, but to Leliana herself.

“I bought you a coat,” the woman said without preamble, reaching into a pack on her back and throwing a large, oversized coat of leather onto Asha’s crossed legs. As she’d been feeding mana tentatively into the fire every time she started shivering, Asha accepted it and threaded her arms through the sleeves gratefully.

“Is anyone else with you?”

Leliana sat down opposite her, hair red in the light of the flames of the fire between them. “I came alone.”

“I don’t want to see the Commander.”

“Yes, even Cullen was astute enough to deduce that particular fact.”

“How long were you going to wait until you told me who he was?”

“As long as it took for you to find out and not run away afterwards,” Leliana replied, casting a meaningful look at the empty darkness in which they found themselves. “The Commander left the Order following his disillusionment and disgust at seeing them at their worst, but I knew you two working together was a calculated risk. I had planned on... managing the variables of that particular confrontation a little better.”

“Forgive me if I don’t feel too much sympathy for him,” Asha said bitterly, “he can’t have seen them at their worst if he still wants to work with them to close the Breach.”

“That is not a plan I endorse,” Leliana grumbled. 

“Why not?”

She shrugged, “the Rebel Mages are more likely to be of immediate help. Their already unstable position has been weakened since the attack on the Conclave. We stand to make a much more advantageous alliance if we approach them.”

“So, tactically, they’re the better option.” Asha said, with thinly veiled sarcasm. She admitted that it stung to find out that Leliana's position was not dictated by a pragmatic, not moral, stance. The chantry sister saw no reason to fear what the Templars would do with power, only note that they had a less desperate need for it.

“Tactically, the better option is the one that keeps the Herald of Andraste with us,” Leliana replied honestly, raising an eyebrow.

“I told you, I’m not your 'Herald'.”

“Whether you believe you are a gift from the Maker or not is irrelevant. People are desperate for a sign of hope. For some, you’re that sign. And having that sign... well, it gives the Inquisition a very particular kind of legitimacy. I have not stopped the rumours that surround you from spreading, not because of my own beliefs, but because it is in our favour to have a prophet on our side.”

“I’ve told you, I’m not interested in some foreign god’s holy war.”

“And what I’m telling you, Ashatarsylnin, is that you are important to us, and that keeping you here is important to us. You’d be wise to listen.”

“Don’t threaten-”

“-You will know when I’m threatening you, trust me,” the woman’s gaze was dark and shadowed, and Asha fought back a shiver as she heartily agreed with those words. 

“You’re... you’re saying I can bargain with you.”

“Josie suggested that you currently do not feel safe in the Inquisition. I am offering you the chance to say what will make you feel safe. We will not let Commander Cullen go, because he has the loyalty and respect of our soldiers, but all other demands will be heard and considered.”

Asha let out a long breath, that was loud in the quiet of the dark forest. For all she knew, Leliana’s scouts silently lined the trees, all with arrows trained on her jugular. Although she hoped that she wasn’t so out of practice that she would miss an ambush entirely. 

Ok, then. Leliana had baited another trap right in front of her eyes, but again she would bite.

She leaned forward, “I will never work with Templars.”

“That much is _patently_ obvious.”

“I never want to be trapped in a room with the Commander again.”

Leliana hesitated, considering, “we can certainly keep you separate for now. A little distance might do you both good, and fits with our current plans, in fact. But it would compromise the logistical integrity of the Inquisition to detach itself from military operations entirely.”

Asha let out a long breath, before having the bravery to clarify, “No, I mean _trapped_. I want there always to be clear exits that I’m allowed to take at any point in time if I need to leave, and I want there to always be another person there with me if I have to talk to him.” She paused, and added meaningfully, “it would be for the benefit of both of us.”

Leliana’s face remained an impartial mask as she said, “those parameters are wise and can be arranged.”

“I want you to tell me the names of every single Templar or Templar sympathiser in the Inquisition, so that I know to avoid them.”

“I will tell you the names of all bar my agents. Such an information leak would be disastrous if it fell into the wrong hands, and compromise cover years in the making.”

“Then it’s your responsibility to make sure I never come into contact with those agents.”

“Understood.”

Asha sighed, “I don’t want you guys to call me the Herald to my face. And I don’t just want to be a useless figurehead who you cart out for pilgrims to gawk at. I want freedom to come and go from Haven as I please. I don’t want to be stuck here.”

“That actually relates to what we were going to propose as your next steps within the organisation, should you stay with us. You are not a prisoner, Asha.”

“Oh, ok.” Asha bit her lip. She wished she had time to come up with a real list of demands, this farce of a negotiation all seemed rather anticlimactic after her race away from Haven. Maybe she could demand something stupidly extravagant, like a wardrobe of silks, or a pet bear. “I want other mages to be able to join the Inquisition without recrimination,” she said, “Oh, and I want Solas to be safe!”

Leliana’s expression quirked with amusement at that. “We have processes in place for vetting anyone who wishes to join our ranks. I will allow you to review and partake in them, if you wish. Obviously, abominations are not welcome in the Inquisition, but we have no reason to turn any other mages away, and as Solas - who will continued to be welcomed among us - proves, we have need of their expertise.”

“You’ll look for the people who killed Clan Lavellan?”

“I will update you on any developments my agents have regarding their investigation, which has already begun.”

“And I want a roommate!” Asha bit her lip, blushing at how childish she sounded, “preferably not a fanatic, but I feel less scared when I’m not alone.”

“Consider it done.” At Asha’s startled expression, Leliana smiled in a kind of detached, cold way that Asha supposed was meant to look non-threatening, though it certainly didn’t achieve friendly, “I mean it when I say you are an important asset, Asha. The anchor is an important tool in fighting this threat, but I would also like you on our side. You are valuable to us. Do you have any other demands?”

The only things that came readily to mind were money and chocolate, neither of which sounded like a clever thing to say aloud. “...Not that I can think of, no,” Asha admitted.

“We would also like to offer you an official place in war room discussions,” Leliana told her, “you do not necessarily need to vote on every motion, but we will keep you up-to-date on what directions we are taking the Inquisition in, and we welcome your input on any and all matters we bring to the war table.”

Asha didn’t exactly relish the idea of being in a room with those people again so soon after their disastrous first meeting, but even she had to admit that her wilful ignorance was what had resulted with her unwittingly coming face-to-face with the Knight Captain of Kirkwall in the first place. “I accept,” she said, and then paused, scrutinising Leliana’s shadowed face, “you’re... not being nice to me, are you?”

“No one is nice in a negotiation,” the spymaster said, this time the glint of a real smile - which was a mercenary, predatory thing. “I am merely being pragmatic, in order to preserve an important business relationship.”

The brutal honesty was refreshing - at least, Asha hoped Leliana was being honest, and she was not just being incredibly gullible. But frankly, although she would never ever claim to be the schemiest of schemers, Asha couldn’t really see the play here. Leliana could’ve found her in this empty clearing and dragged her back unconscious to Haven’s dungeons, if she wanted. 

Asha realised that, although she was pretty certain this woman could kill her and then hide the body in a multitude of incredibly efficient ways, she kind of liked her. She wasn’t sure precisely what that said about her as a person.

 _Kind of like my momentary crushes on not-so-secret templars,_ she thought. Best to push the implications of that to the far, far corners of her mind.

“Are we definitely alone here?” she asked, after the silence had stretched out a few moments.

Leliana’s gaze glinted knife bright in the dark, “why, are you going to try and kill me?”

“Gods, no!” Asha was startled to find that she laughed at that, and was gratified when Leliana smiled as well. So it was meant to be a joke, and not just morbidly high levels of paranoia. “It’s just, well, I thought... if we were having this interlude of radical honesty…”

 _Just do it,_ she thought and stood up, hem of her new coat falling past her knees. “I’m going to show you my brand now. Get all of this awkwardness over and done with straight away,” she said in a hurried rush.

When Leliana didn’t respond, she continued babbling, “I... I figure that that must be what you’re making all these promises as a down-payment for, so I should show you’re getting your money’s worth. Not that you're giving me money. Are you even paying me? Ah, sorry! I should - I should... show you you’re definitely getting the former-tranquil-saviour your cause so desperately needs.”

Leliana scrutinised her silently throughout this entire vomited speech, then tilted her head and replied calmly, “If you’d like.”

“I’m going to need to undress a little,” Asha said, already shrugging off her coat and shivering in the cold night air. Then, the little demon inside her that couldn’t handle being in close proximity to pretty people added, “not in a sexy way! The brand is under my clothes.”

There was a dry laugh. “I gathered.”

Cringing, Asha handed the coat over the fire, back into Leliana’s hands. The woman watched her as she sat back down again, facing away from the fire and into the darkness of the still forest at night. The fire illuminated Asha's back and began to warm it, and the shadowed lines of trees were the only things she could make out in the inky blackness as she began to fumble with the bottom of her shirt, tugging it free of her waistband.

“I’m going to let you see it once,” she said, fighting to keep her voice calm. “And I don’t want to have to show it to anyone else.”

“You have my word.”

“There’s... definitely no one else watching us right now?”

“No one.”

Asha let out a shaky breath, watching the fog of it dissipate into the cold night air. “Well, ok then,” she said, needlessly, and with a shaky, barely-there curse, she pushed her hair out of the way over one shoulder, and pulled up the back of her ill-fitting shirt high enough to bear her whole back. She shuffled backwards, close enough to feel the blaze of the fire hot on the exposed length of her spine.

There was silence. She imagined the spymaster’s examination of her. Her unnerving, eagle-eyed gaze coming to settle on the bare expanse of skin between Asha's two thin shoulderblades. Nestled directly between them, emblazoned on the hard knobs of her spine, was the lyrium sunburst brand of tranquility.

She heard Leliana let out a small breath - not quite a gasp of shock or hum of understanding. Just a sharp inhale, the kind when you realise you’re about to scald yourself and pulled back your hand just in time. She supposed the woman was surprised to find that she was actually telling the truth. She heard a shifting, and then Leliana's voice, which was closer than before, “May I?”

“Touch it?” just the anticipation of fingers on her skin made her feel nauseous, but she did not want to go through all this only for the spymaster to dismiss the evidence as a trick of the light. “Sure.”

She’d expected Leliana’s hands to be cold, like the rest of her demeanor, but of course the forest was fucking freezing, so they were unexpectedly warm in comparison. It was still clinical and detached - the exact reason she’d elected the spymaster as her witness, because she knew the woman would take in every detail without any outbursts of emotion. Even though this woman was the first person who'd seen the brand since Asha had returned to consciousness, it didn't really feel intimate, just awkward. Asha flinched when Leliana's fingers alighted on what she knew was scarred flesh. Despite not being able to see it, she could feel her fingertips trace the ridge of the sunburst. 

“It was a show of strength,” she said shakily, voice loud in the still air, trying to will herself to dissociate from the touch and make the whole ordeal go by more quickly. “They made me strip down - I thought it was going to some kind of weird sex thing - but then they just made me kneel and cower in the dirt while they decided where to put it. They chose that spot because the skin was untouched,” she shuddered, “‘a part of myself I could never reach.’ they said. They... they made a joke about how, you know, when you get an itch there, you can never quite scratch it? Your arms can never reach where they’re needed. Not that an itch would ever bother a tranquil, so I don’t know what they were talking about.”

She remembered being forced to bow her head until she kissed blood stained dirt, the hand heavy on her exposed neck, and the darkness around her vision as she waited, heart pounding, for the unseen brand to finally hit skin. She’d heard the far off sizzle of it long before it had ever hit flesh. She’d certainly felt weak then.

The spymaster’s hand left her back, bringing her back to the present. She didn’t know how long the woman’s examination had lasted, but she immediately tugged her shirt back down to hide the brand from view. She was shivering, but that could be just as much from the cold as her own disgust.

“Thank you,” Leliana said as she handed back the coat, “This was... useful information.”

“Don’t mention it,” Asha joked weakly, wrapping the coat tightly around her and turning back to face the other woman. “Campfire overshares are practically a staple of Dalish culture.”

“No, Asha,” Leliana’s gaze was just as emotionless as ever, but bore into her with a renewed intensity, “that was a display of vulnerability, one that you offered willingly. Thank you.”

Asha was fighting her traitorous mouth’s urge to add, _not in a sexy way!_ to the Spymaster’s sentence, so she simply nodded.

Leliana sighed, running a hand over her face. It was the first open sign of tiredness or vulnerability that Asha had seen in the leader of the Inquisition. When she spoke again, Asha was surprised at her words, “I was... I know the Hero of Ferelden, Rose Amell. She was a Circle mage. Although joining the Wardens is something of a death sentence, she always said she welcomed the Call, and I never really understood why. Then she told me about tranquility, and her fears surrounding it. I know how much it dogs a mage’s every step. When I think about it possibly happening to her…” for a moment Asha almost thought Leliana looked flustered, or gods, even scared, but it was gone in a flash, “I’m truly sorry for what happened to you, Asha.” 

And then, over the top of the fire, the light glinting off her dark expression, Leliana offered that same predatory smile again.

“And I can promise you that we will find whoever did this, and make them pay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My chapters are going to be a little late this week! Haven't had time to edit them (plus the next one is a bit of a hot mess and I'm trying to make it less of one!) 
> 
> Fun fact! My female warden in Origins is always called 'Rose' because then if you romance Alistair it makes the gift he gives you so much sweeter. Was the warden in this fic's worldstate romanced by Leliana? Who can say! I'm sure it will be explored in later chapters...
> 
> Thanks for sticking with me this far <3


	13. Chapter Thirteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Let's just send our traumatised Herald into a templar-mage warzone! I'm sure it will be fine!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: violence

Asha received the news that she was expected to travel to the Hinterlands from the far end of the war room, with her staff strapped to her back, just a hands breadth from the door.

She watched Cullen warily as he explained in a perfunctory, business-like tone that a Horsemaster known as Dennett lived in the area, and that the Inquisition would like to acquire as many of his mounts as possible. She also was careful to keep Cassandra in sight, as Leliana had explained the woman’s connection to the templars on their walk back to Haven last night. Asha had been somewhat gratified by how long the journey back had been - it seemed that even though she was out of shape, the slope of the land had meant she’d managed to run a good few miles away from the village in her attempted escape. Unfortunately, that had meant a lot of time for awkward bursts of conversation with the woman she now knew was called the Nightingale in frightened whispered, and a lot more silence, as they carefully walked back through the dark trees and Asha tried not to think of the numerous ways Leliana could stab her and then hide the body.

What Cullen and the others knew of her and Leliana’s negotiations, it was hard to say, although she assumed that they had been informed about everything, including the very real existence of her tranquil brand. The Commander’s eyes didn’t meet hers as he explained Dennet’s position in the valley, and their concerns about his lack of cooperation so far. The entire meeting had been conducted with this same enforced calm, with Asha’s outburst yesterday hanging unspoken like a black cloud over the room. Leliana was the only one who spoke in a truly unruffled and unconcerned manner, and the others started to relax once it was clear that Asha had their spymaster’s approval. Although she felt bad about the almost-reckless almost-use of magic, she couldn’t find it in her to try and make everyone feel more comfortable with her presence. As Leliana had said, it was their job to make her want to stay.

“Look for other opportunities to expand the Inquisition’s influence while you’re there,” said Josephine, smiling at her tentatively over her clipboard.

“Preferably, in full view of Redcliffe,” Leliana added, “we want the mages to be know who we are.”

“Understood,” Asha said, with a nod and a taut grimace that somewhat resembled a smile. 

“And, well,” Cullen fidgeted, “there’s something you should-”

“There will be Templars,” Cass told her in a brusque tone. “The fall of Ferelden’s Circle and the relocation of the Rebel Mages to Redcliffe means that many of the skirmishes between the two factions of this war are concentrated in the Hinterland area.”

“...ok.”

“They, well, they’re likely to be hostile,” Cullen said, the pained look on his face telling her that he really wanted to be anywhere but here. “We advise caution.”

“I’m sure.”

“I will be going with you, as will Solas and Varric,” Cassandra continued, seemingly saving Cullen from himself. “Hopefully, most Templars will recognise my clothing on sight and not engage. If they do… we will need to forcefully subdue them.”

“And not allow them to report back to any chain of command that might be hostile to our activity in the area,” Leliana added helpfully.

“So you’re sending me on a Templar-killing mission, and hoping this doesn’t awaken anything in me?” Asha asked with a wry smile. At the stunned, horrified silence that followed, she sighed, running a hand through her hair, “sorry, that was in bad taste. I appreciate the heads up. Face off against angry Templars, try not to be reduced to a quivering mess, but don’t become a murder-happy abomination either. Got it. I’ll do my best, I guess.”

As she watched the Inquisition’s leadership hastily try to bring their awkward consultation to a close, she caught Leliana’s eye and gave a nod before ducking out quietly. It was a good idea to send her out into the field. Maybe everyone - including her - would all be more comfortable with her gone.

The first human Asha killed did not turn out to be a Templar, but a mage.

Well, maybe that wasn’t true. The battle for Clan Lavellan’s lands had been swift and brutal, a series of half-remembered flashes in her mind, and she had not known the templars’ numbers when they attacked. So maybe one of the people she’d hit, in those desperate moments to save the clan when it proved already too late, had died. 

This one, though, was the first one she _knew_ was hers

The Crossroads were a mess of churned earth and scorched grass, and Asha now understood the severity of her colleagues’ warnings at the war table. Just the landscape alone was enough to bring memories long-suppressed to the surface, even before she heard the clang of metal and saw the shine of chest plate and flaming-sword shields. 

“Inquisition forces!” Cassandra bellowed over the clash of weapons. “Trying to protect the refugees.”

“Looks like they could use a hand!”

Heart in her throat, Asha froze for a second, taking in the brutality of scene. The assailants on the camp were dressed in full templar plate. She watched, terrified, as an armoured figure ran an Inquisition scout clean through, their sword protruding from the woman's stomach for a moment before being brutally retracted. The scout was small. The templar seemed to tower over her, and for a second, Asha saw another image superimposed over this one, of a weaponless woman falling under a blade that had cut through her like she was paper, two years before.

The scout slumped limp on the ground, as that woman had before her.

“Come on, Asha!” Solas shouted from her left. A quick glance in his direction told her he was struggling to protect everyone while she stood rooted to the spot. There was no time to dwell on the past, she told herself, and with a strange, volatile feeling fluttering in her chest, she flung herself into the battle

She remembered fighting templars. She remembered the way they had forcibly silenced her magic and forced her to the ground, how they deflected her ranged attacks with their shields and had even sent them ricocheting back on her own people. So she took those hard-won - well, hard-lost - lessons and put them to use, barriering the warriors that already swarmed them and then sending lightning plunging through the ground towards their feet. She watched as their bodies convulsed - so similar to the demons she had killed in the past few weeks, but dangerously different. Their helmets still meant that to her, they were faceless nightmares. But it was human bodies that contorted in pain as muscles spasmed, and the horrible thing was that that difference didn’t matter much to Asha at all.

“Hold, we are not apostates!” came Cassandra’s cry from the midst of the fray.

 _But we are,_ came a gleeful voice in a far corner of Asha’s mind. The part of her that wanted these soldiers afraid, and wanted them dead.

There was a weird sense of satisfaction when one of the templars sighted her, and began to advance towards her. Now, she could fight. “ _Nuva uralas telsyl na i’ga syl nyel laimem,_ ” she spat, willing the masked, faceless figure forward. But as they inched closer, body mostly obscured by their shield, she could feel her heart jackrabbiting in her chest, tasted the iron tang of fear on her tongue even as she desperately tried to cling to her anger. Logic left her. Her mana bottomed out as she frantically threw spell after spell at them with little thought, waiting for one of them to take hold. Was it bloodlust, or pure, unthinking fear that drove her to throw everything she had at them in one reckless swoop? Whichever emotion drove her, they were both ineffective. The soldier remained standing as frantic spells landed wider and wider, and when they charged, it was sheer animal instinct that caused her to dive to the side, mouth full of dirt as she rolled in a tangle of limbs, struggling to her feet in the churned mud.

She’d goaded them out of vengeful spite, but if the soldier got near her, she would be powerless to stop them from killing her. She was still so _weak_. The weight of armour alone would probably pin her and her starved, paper thin body. Still weak, still useless, still prey caught wild-eyed and trembling in the snare of a waiting predator.

Fury became indistinguishable from panic, and they grew together to become something terrible that welled up inside her, as technique was lost to desperation. It drove her to keep casting spell after offensive spell until her mana was depleted to nothing, the world greying slightly at the edges, and it snarled like a hungry, ravenous thing when the templar’s shield deflected the majority of her frenzied attacks and it ended up being Cass who ran him through. She felt something tear at her throat, and realised that the snarl had actually come from her.

The templars seemed to be gone, but the whole world was fading into that panicked, ice-bright state that came with adrenaline and terror. Surely there were more, waiting in the shadows and the trees, like there had been in the forest near Ostwick. Her fear of her surroundings was so strong that when she heard Varric’s pained shout and saw the figure of assailant almost upon him, she released the energy barrage she’d been desperately building from the scraps of mana that were left without a second thought to restrain it. The power fuelled by her panic and wild self-preservation flew from her in an erratic flurry. Somehow, despite her magical exhaustion, it was twice, three times as strong as she had expected it to be.

It hit her new target straight in their chest. Their unarmoured chest. The electrical current burned a dark scorch mark through the thin fabric they wore, a dark angry burn forming on the skin underneath. Their whole body tensed in a rictus of pain as energy lanced across their skin, and then they dropped dead instantly. To her right, an ice mine suddenly exploded, the sign that the mage who’d placed it had lost control of their glyph.

There wasn’t enough time to connect the two in the moment, as another wave of people came at them. More templars, more opportunities to claw at some semblance of control by forcing them to drop. But afterwards, Asha walked up to the charred corpse, their scorched robes and the pattern of lightning marks on the ground around them, and was abruptly sick next to the body.

She carried that nausea inside her well into the evening, when they returned to the Inquisition camp. She barely remembered conducting an absurdly polite conversation with Mother Giselle through a haze of shock. It had all felt vaguely surreal to debate her status as a saviour so soon after wanton bloodshed, and she had fought the urge to laugh hysterically several times. But perhaps that barrier of numbness had made her personality less abrasive, because she vaguely remembered the woman agreeing to help them before moving off to Cassandra to say something about Val Royeaux. 

For once, she did not worry that this numbness marked a fall back into tranquility. Her emotions had been so wild in the moment of battle that some distance was not a thing she feared, but welcomed. There was a difference between desperately trying to feel something when your mind wouldn’t let you, and willing yourself not to feel: the distinction between being locked out of a room, and locking yourself in to protect yourself from the outside world.

She only came back into herself as the sky was darkening to a bruise purple on the horizon, when a warm metal canteen was pushed into her hands. Not even heeding who’d handed it over, she sipped from it automatically, before sputtering, grimacing at the horribly bitter tasting tea inside. Asha glanced up and was surprised to see Solas watching her silently, “what is this? Is it _meant_ to taste like this?”

He offered her a small, understated smile before he sat down next to her. She realised then that she was sat crossed legged in front of the campfire, staring listlessly into the flames.“It is my prescription for shock,” he told her calmly, “and unfortunately yes, it is supposed to taste like that. I’m told some people enjoy it.”

“Oh,” Asha looked down, lifted her shoulders in a slight shrug, and took another experimental sip, shuddering even as warmth filled her stomach. “Do you need anything?”

“Not really, no. But I thought it best to offer some distraction from darker thoughts.”

“Dark thoughts? Me?” Asha cast a sidelong glance at him, and was silent for a long time. When he showed no sign of leaving, she said into the quiet. “I made my first kill today”

“Yes.”

“I mean, I used to hunt all the time, and we’ve killed all those demons, and Creators know that that bear that came into camp deserved to die if only because _it just would not give up_ ,” Asha babbled, “but. Well, That was my first human. Elf, maybe. Person.”

Silence.

“Was it yours?” she asked.

“No, it wasn’t. I have killed people before.”

The silence stretched out, as Asha struggled to process that. She wanted to ask who and how, but she knew deep down she didn't actually want to know. Not right now.

“I thought mine would be a Templar.” she finally admitted.

“Did you want it to be?”

She took another sip of tea, remembered it was awful, and hurriedly put it down on the ground before her reflexes led to her taking another mouthful. “No? No. Killing people has never really factored into my plans or desires. But I thought that…” she swallowed, “the only way I imagined ever killing anyone was if they threatened me to a point where I had no other option. Backed me into a corner until the only thing I could do was lash out. I’ve only ever imagined that situation with templars,” she swallowed. “And I’m… I’m wondering whether, if it had been a templar, if I would be fine right now.”

“You think that if it was the dead face of your enemy, you would find pleasure in it?”

“I mean, maybe I prepared myself for them dying? Maybe that’s a death I’d want ownership of?” she struggled for words, “the mage is not the only corpse in that field. I didn’t even bother to look at the others. Just because I didn’t cast the killing blow doesn’t mean that several people didn’t die because of me today. I guess I just- I just-”

She couldn’t finish the thought. 

It wasn’t about the deaths, not really. She was reeling from how her mind had been entirely in thrall to panic and bloodlust, devoid of any logical thought. The _opposite_ of tranquil. On paper, she’d attacked that mage in self-defense, because she had to, and so it should be a clean, clear cut thing, devoid of guilt. But what truly scared her was that that was all just a retroactive excuse, a justification she could feel herself forming to combat this awful, looming disgust. When she’d lashed out in the moment it hadn’t been self-preservation, it had been almost without thought, borne from an instinctive desire to hurt, or else be hurt by others. There had been no siren song asking her to become a blood mage, but she had been faced with violence and she’d simply met it with a savagery of her own. The way she just felt now was so... out of control. Surely killing would not help her to stop feeling like this, so overwhelmed all the time?

She needed to get herself under control. She'd fallen back into the world through some fluke of luck, but she wasn't quite sure how to exist there.

“I’ve thought of a way you can help me,” she said, suddenly, half surprised when the words came out loud.

“Oh?” If Solas was confused by the turn in their conversation, he didn’t show it. His words simply held a gentle, unassuming curiosity. Perhaps he was just making non-committal noises to try and coax her thoughts out of her, and she wondered why exactly the group had elected him as her counsellor.

“Sorry, not with the whole death thing. That's kind of a separate issue,” she clarified, clasping and unclasping her fingers, “but… do you meditate?”

“I do.”

When he offered no more than a quizzically raised eyebrow, she continued, her words coming out in a rush. “My keeper used to force me to meditate all the time. She always felt like I was too reckless and impatient, that I needed to centre myself. She wanted me to be the kind of mage she was, all solemn and calm and 'ooooh you carry the wisdom of Elvhenan in your veins' - you know, the kind who just bleed lore?" she then paused for a second, awkwardly, realising she'd just described _Solas_. "But I hated it. It improved my magic and willpower, sure, but no one warned me about... that aching silence. Deshanna would have called it peace but... I hated trying to sever my connections with the outside world, being alone with my thoughts. It’s like I always knew that I was going to be tranquil... but that’s stupid, of course I didn’t.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Of course you don't - I'm not making sense. What I’m trying to say is…” She let out a heavy breath. “Since I came back my thoughts... have been all over the place. I react, rather than take my time to unpick. It’s like everything is slightly off since I woke up - every emotion is too strong, and I’m so scared all the time that that fear bleeds into everything I do. Every time something happens, I fall off kilter and can’t reach equilibrium until I swing wildly in the other direction to right myself."

 _Don't mention the words 'blood magic',_ she thought. She had no idea what Solas would think of her if she told him she'd thought she'd heard a demon, back in Haven.

“And then I’m getting thrown into these high pressure situations where all I have to depend on is that reflex, that kickback. When I killed that person, it was sheer instinct like a wild animal, because I was terrified and full of hate I could not rein in.”

“I don’t think that your experience is particularly different from anyone in a life or death situation," he murmured gently.

“No - you don’t - I've _been through_ life or death situations, Solas. I’m telling you, something’s wrong! I don’t think I’ve come back broken, because I don’t deserve to think that,” she looked at Solas, “but this world - my experience of it - it's different from how I remember. Maybe my relationship to it has changed. Or maybe the world itself has transformed into something that’s just really fucking _hard_ to return to. Maybe it’s something as terribly simple as this being my first time ever being alone, without those who know me better than I know myself to quell all my reckless impulses. I need to take some time to figure out what the fuck is going on, but I’m also terrified at what I’m going to find if I do.” 

_What if there’s something else lurking there, under the surface,_ were the words that lay unspoken beneath her words. What would happen if she looked inwards and found a demon laying in wait, biding its time for her moment of weakness, for the cracks in her mind that tranquility had left to burst open? What if she encountered it without anyone around to act like a safety net?

“Sorry,” She swallowed as Solas watched her with an unreadable expression “Basically, that was the long-winded way of me asking: would you allow me to join you when you meditate? I need to take some time to try and get myself under control, but I think I need company when I do it. For my safety, and for the safety of everyone around me. Otherwise... if the Inquisition keeps throwing me into life-or-death situations… if this happens again-”

“I understand.” he said quietly, and she let out a sigh of relief because it meant she didn’t have to keep talking.

“Thank you,” she offered him the weak semblance of a smile. “I hope me being there doesn’t ruin it for you.”

“On the contrary, it would be my pleasure.”

They lapsed back into silence again, Asha feeling her exhaustion with new weight now that she’d been dragged a little closer to reality. She watched Solas as he seemingly gazed into the flames, though his eyes were shadowed and he didn’t seem to really be looking at them. The glow cast a fine line of light across the strong lines of his profile, making his face seem less severe. Still, his thoughtful gaze held something similar to how Deshanna would look sometimes. Almost... regal? She must be more tired than she realised, and at that thought Asha yawned wide.

“I shall leave you,” Solas said, “you need rest.” He stood up again to make his exit, and hesitated before continuing, “You do not yet feel at home in the Inquisition.” 

It was not posed as a question. Asha gave a derisive snort, “is it that obvious?”

“Although I understand and share your misgivings, I do not think they are the monsters you fear they could be,” he replied, “a little misguided in their beliefs, perhaps. But they are good people. So are you.”

Asha felt awkward under his scrutiny, and scrambled to find some kind of joke to alleviate the tension. She was still coming up empty handed when he walked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooooh, this weekend's update has been two Very Serious™ chapters! Lots of character groundwork to lay. I can promise something fluffier next week once Asha gets a bit of a handle on her life!!
> 
> Notes: elven from Project Elvhen, as always. For anyone struggling to find the curses (like I did for an embarrassing amount of time) they're all in Chapter 18 of 'Project Elvhen: Expanding the Elvhen Language.'


	14. Chapter Fourteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha surprisingly... loves the Hinterlands!

Asha couldn’t exactly say that her fieldwork in the Hinterlands bought her joy - there was no way that word could be used when half of her days were spent in absolute drudgery - but it definitely bought comfort. The establishment of a familiar routine, free from the watchful gazes of Haven, gave her the breathing space she needed to reacquaint herself with what it felt like to fully experience the world, to no longer be encased in a shell of numbness. She definitely hadn’t got around to facing everything that had happened both before and after receiving the brand. But it was a week into their trip when, waking up sweating from a nightmare she couldn’t even remember, she accepted that she might need to take some time to learn exactly how tranquility had remoulded her against her will.

But more than anything, freedom in the Hinterlands offered endless opportunities to do Anything But That. She lost herself in long treks and menial tasks that left her so tired by sunset that she could only manage shovelling some tasteless, bland food into her mouth before passing out unceremoniously in her tent. The only shocks she got were the ones that came from bathing herself in streams made frigidly cold from ice melt. There was no time to dwell on the past, or begin worrying about the future. 

It helped that so much of the work they were doing held a comforting similarity to what life had been like as her clan’s First. Collecting and scavenging out supplies for the refugees at the Crossroads, relearning rusty bow skills to hunt down druffallo for meat, returning people’s lost trinkets and goods, wandering miles through endless countryside until you thought your legs might actually fall off - these were all things she’d done when protecting the peace and wellbeing of Clan Lavellan. Talking to people about their day-to-day problems and offering a little something to help was something Asha actually felt _qualified_ to do. She even managed to placate a bunch of creepy cultists along the eastern road - an act of diplomacy and personal control that she thought would’ve made Keeper Deshanna proud. She liked sharing tales around the campfire with Inquisition scouts - even if Varric still undeniably told the best stories, once he realised that she didn't actually know who 'Hawke' was. And she liked sleeping rough in the wilderness, with tired muscles that weighed you down into dreamless oblivion.

If her travel companions noticed her reluctance to return to Haven - the way she proposed an extension before their allotted two weeks drew to a close, or requested that Scout Harding escort Mother Giselle to Haven in her place, or made Dennett’s requests for watchtowers via letter and not in person - they didn’t comment on it. Asha was grateful they were letting her seek out peaceful respite for a few weeks, although she supposed that - in a war torn countryside where half her days were spent skirmishing with bandits, rift demons, and deserters of the mage-templar war - ‘peace’ was certainly a relative term.

Every morning she’d spend a good hour or so training with her staff. Her magic was beginning to flow effortlessly through her, snagging and faltering less on the remnants of uncertainty and panic - although it was clear that, when fury hit her, fire and tempest's might most easily answered her call. She was still reckless and a little sloppy in her technique, as she had been before Deshanna truly began training her as her First, but was mostly just glad to have almost fully regained her repertoire of spells. It would be a long time before she considered expanding it, as she had been when the clan was attacked, and she focused on finessing and shoring up the weaknesses in what she already knew.

After that, when her mana was drained to its dregs, Solas left his tent to join her and she valiantly attempted to meditate in his company. As she expected, it was hard to do something that felt so akin to tranquility. When she half-succeeded in making the world fall away from her, she often got hit by a sudden pang of vertigo that made her fall abruptly out of her trance, grateful to find herself once more grounded in reality. Only a few times in their final weeks did she manage to achieve a prolonged meditation. She felt out the channels and runnels between her willpower and her magic, tentatively probing for wounds and flaws that would explain the tidal waves of emotion that often slammed into her unexpectedly. She didn’t find any source of the darkness as she’d feared - though she was pretty certain that might be because she was wilfully avoiding it. Still, Solas’ constant companionship in these silent moments made her feel grounded. His solemn presence beside her meant that she at least felt certain that she wouldn’t lose herself.

Gods, it was still so _boring_ though. A necessary evil to strengthen her magic and newfound sense of self, but she could never see it as anything other than a chore. And her butt always ached afterwards. She couldn’t believe that Solas actually enjoyed it.

Despite all this, even Asha had to admit when their work in the Hinterlands was done. The Crossroads were stable and safe, they’d closed every rift the Inquisition currently had eyes on - even the one by Dennett’s homestead which had caused her to fall face first into a river when evading a terror demon, and then her subsequently wet hair frozen solid by a horrible, withered despair demon that had snuck into her blindspot. The Inquisition’s presence in the valley swelled as Dennett’s watchtowers were erected by Cullen’s troops - those were the exact words Varric used, while maintaining obnoxiously wilful eye contact with Cassandra. 

They were still barred from passage into Redcliffe, so the true mark of finality on their current expedition came when Dennett finally offered them their mounts. Asha (and the constant ache in her legs) could barely contain her excitement, cooing over the deep chestnut mare that Dennett brought up in front of her.

“Aren’t you just the prettiest?” She baby-talked at the massive beast, scritching at its soft, velvety nose, “we are going to be best friends. We will stomp demons to death with our hooves. Yes we will. Yes we will!”

“Your shining stead arrives,” Solas said with a wry smile from nearby his own mount, “does she have a name? Perhaps Ethalan? Faron? Ladahlen?”

“Oh,” Asha snorted, and cast him an awkward sideways look, “I was going to call her Buttons.”

The other three cast her incredulous glances.

“Her dark eyes look like Buttons ok?” Asha sighed, “damn, I forget you people weren’t around when I named a halla ‘Moonlight’-”

She froze, something stopping her from continuing the story, in which Ellana had promptly named her own beast ‘Chalk’ out of solidarity. Luckily, Varric interrupted before anyone could notice her stricken pause: “What were you, five?” 

“Alas, I was sixteen,” Asha grinned shamelessly. “Naming things has never been my forte. I think it stems from the permanent trauma of having such a ridiculous name. Ma always despaired of me having children, the stinking hypocrite. ‘Buttons’ is a good, short name. We need more good, short names in this world.”

“Be careful what you wish for, Flash,” said Varric over his shoulder, as he went to collect his bags from outside the stable.

“No, that is _not_ a thing! FLASHISNOTBECOMINGATHING-” Asha called out until he had disappeared, getting precisely the reaction he’d no doubt wanted. While she knew that receiving an official nickname marked her true acceptance into the group, she couldn’t shake the fear that it was that first wild energy barrage that had earned her the moniker. She supposed that her affinity with all things generally explosive meant that her nickname was always going to involve something vaguely lightning themed. 

“It... could be worse,” Cassandra offered up charitably.

“Yes, I suppose I’m glad ‘Parasol’ didn’t stick.” Their initial altercations with demons had been the only story Asha had felt brave enough to share around the fire, and it had been a _mistake_.

She glanced over at the Seeker as she began securing her own packs onto the horse’s back. Her relationship with Cass had relaxed over the last few weeks. There was only so many times you could watch a woman literally hurl herself directly into harm’s way on your behalf, and still not trust them. As long as they avoided the topic of the Maker, they actually got on pretty well. Asha could tell that all her hard work in the last few weeks under the Inquisition’s banner had earned the warrior’s approval. Regardless of whether they believed the same things, they at least had the same goals.

“I wanted to talk to you about something before we returned,” Cassandra said in a stilted voice, clearly awkward. 

Asha couldn’t fight the flutter in her chest. Even though she’d decided after these weeks of travel that the Seeker and her would never ever be romantically compatible - even if she was ever able to disregard the fact that Cass was technically more of an acting templar than even Cullen was, Cassandra was so depressing straight - she still felt the slight thrill that came from being in close proximity to a very attractive, competent person. It mostly manifested as long, appreciative glances at the woman’s ‘aesthetic’... which she was absolutely certain Cassandra was oblivious too, in keeping with the so depressingly straight trend.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“Obviously, I’ve noticed that you… have been training. To improve your magic, and your physical fitness.”

“...And?”

“Well, I was wondering...if well...” _Goodness_. Asha thought. Even if her appreciative crush remained, they’d gotten well past the point where she was a stuttering fool around the Seeker. Creators forbid she’d merely passed the torch to Cassandra. “If you would like my help.”

“Um… I don’t think I’m going to be picking a sword anytime soon.”

“I don’t want you to think that we’ll be fighting!” Cassandra said in a rush, revealing the source of her awkwardness. “I would not fight you. Not without your consent. Obviously. I was merely going to suggest - if you would be comfortable - that I could help you with some physical exercises to help improve your strength. As your magic…”

“...seems not to be terrible anymore.”

“Exactly! It would be strength training and exercises only, and we can carry it on separate from the soldiers, should you require-”

“I’m not scared of the soldiers, Cassandra,” Asha smiled, finding the woman’s overbearing attempts to give her comfort somewhat endearing.

“Good!” Cass sighed, trying to moderate her own tone, “good.”

“I’d love to train with you,” Asha said with a smile, before pausing, “oh gods, you’ll need to remind me that I said that. You might need to get it in writing. It’s going to be in the mornings, isn’t it?”

“Is that not already your routine?”

“Not when I’m on downtime.” Part of the reason she wasn’t dreading going back to Haven was the idea of sleeping in a real, honest-to-gods bed. She gave Cass a sly glance, “I’ve got a feeling you’re a harsher task master than I am.”

“From what I’ve observed these last few weeks, I think you are pretty harsh on yourself.”

“But will this be a getting up at dawn thing? That’s what I’m asking.”

Cassandra gave her a smile that Asha would almost have called slightly wicked. “Of course.”

Asha groaned theatrically, and then groaned some more to get her point across. “There’s a difference between getting up at dawn to sit on my ass and nap some more, and like, I don’t know, go running?” she grimaced at the thought, and the snort it earned from Cassandra was not quite disgusted.

“You nap during our meditation, _lethallan?_ I am shocked and appalled. Your betrayal cuts me to my very core,” came Solas’ dry voice from the other side of the stable, in what Asha knew was a mockery of her own way of speaking.

“You’re just saying that cause I snored _once_ during yesterday’s session!” Asha called back in a sing-song voice. Embarrassing as it had been at the time, she hoped that joking about it would somehow transform it into an endearing character trait.

They saddled up and began to ride out of the Hinterlands, taking the road that wove through the crossroads camp and joined the main trade route, before heading back in the direction of Haven. Asha found herself slightly touched by how many people stopped to watch their progress as they passed - the reverent glances of those who worshipped the Herald were not in the majority, and instead many gave them smiles and friendly waves goodbye, even a few shouted orders to come back. They were just about to turn in the direction of the Inquisition’s homebase when Solas raised a hand, bringing them to a halt. He turned to look at Asha, now both nearly at eye level due to the height of their horses. “I believe I can sense something - one of the artefacts of our people,” he told her.

Asha frowned. Her own magic was unable to detect anything, and while there were a manifold of reasons why that might be the case, the one her mind immediately jumped to was how it signified her own weakness. “Can we go find it?” Solas prompted, and after a second she nodded. She tried to ignore Cass' pointed look as, once he got permission, Solas turned east along the Hinterlands road - the opposite direction than they had planned.

Following Solas, they dismounted and climbed their way up a small scree. The presence of demons, at least, was something that Asha could sense, if only with her nose, and a shade was quickly dispatched. The days when shades had scared her had faded away - she hated to admit it, but demons felt like a mundane aspect of her daily routine now. Probably not a good thing for a mage to say, but at least she was killing them, not inviting them into her mind and body. It was only when it dissipated with surprising swiftness that she realised someone else was flanking it from the other side: a woman, dressed in the bright and gleaming acid green of a keeper’s armour.

For a second, her heart leapt, so that it almost felt lodged in her throat. With her stiff posture, greying hair and long, oak staff, the woman looked, for the briefest of moments, like Keeper Deshanna. Then the resemblance vanished with all the weakness of wishful thinking, and the woman in front of her proved to be a complete stranger. She did not wear the same Mythal vallaslin that adorned Asha’s own face.

“ _Andaran atish’an_.”

“ _Andaran atish’an_ ,” replied Asha, pleased that her voice sounded even and not at all choked.

“I wasn’t expecting to find another of the blood here,” the woman said, with an accent that marked her as belonging to one of the Ferelden clans. Asha had only heard it once before, with a clan that had fled the Brecilian Forest and moved on to the Free Marches. “My name is Mihris.”

“Asha,” Asha replied. She didn’t give her last name either. She hoped that word of Lavellan’s demise had been spread amongst the People, but was also terrified that there had not been anyone left who cared enough to share the news. Either response would’ve been awful: the blank absence of recognition, or the utter look of pity.

“I see you come ready for battle,” The woman gave a pointed look as Asha’s clothes, very clearly not of Dalish make. Asha felt a little shame at her sweeping glance. “Perhaps we can together face a common enemy?”

Even if Asha did not have it ingrained in her to obey Keepers’ requests, Mihris looked too much like Deshanna for her to refuse.

They made their way through the old ruins. Asha tried not to stop and gape as both Solas and Mihris walked through with apparent disinterest. She’d been to ruins before, but never ones that were as in tact as this. Clearly, the caved-in entrance had protected the interior from too much weathering. And never before had they glowed with the sickly light that Asha now recognised from her anchor as the energy of the Fade. Why did they do so now? Had the Breach weakened the Veil enough for it to reach even here? She was silent as they walked through the ancient stillness, unable to fight the feeling that they were disturbing ground no one had trodden for centuries. And more than anything, she couldn’t stop thinking:

_Deshanna would’ve loved this._

Deshanna had always waxed lyrical about the legacy that the Dalish inherited. Asha had understood the importance of their ancestry - as the First, it was her job to continue the remembrance of that line - but for her it was all about the stories: the myths and legends, their splendour and their grandiose tragedy, and the way an entire campfire could fall silent when you retold Falon'Din’s separation from his brother in just the right tone of voice to make tears spring to people’s eyes. It had been about the people: the way that remembering their ancestors inspired something intangible in the eyes of those who truly believed. But for Deshanna, it had been about _places_. Asha had followed her mentor into more dank, grimy holes in the ground than she wanted to count, to watch her exclaim over fragments of arrowheads and stare at carvings they couldn’t understand and… well, meditate. Until the seat of her pants was damp with whatever cavern rot festered in those forgotten places. Asha had caught more than one cold from indulging Deshanna's hobby.

Asha had never really understood it. She _liked_ the aravals - being able to move to new places, see new things, to feel the earth beneath your feet and know wherever you stepped was your home. The idea of being trapped in thick stone walls just… didn’t feel very _elven_ , to her. All she felt when she went into those ruins was how empty and alien they were - plus, they were really _fucking_ creepy. Deshanna had told her she would when she was older, when she could hear the walls speak. She'd never told her, though, exactly what they were supposed to sound like.

Asha didn’t even realise she was crying until Solas turned to her, requesting that she use the anchor to activate the artefact he’d found. His voice sounded a little far away, was all. Then he suddenly froze, looking stricken at the sight of her face, and when she brought her hand up to her cheek her fingers came back wet. 

They’d killed demons, and she hadn’t noticed the tears obstructing her vision.

“Are you…” Solas abruptly trailed off when she silenced him with a quick jerk of her head, holding out her hand. She didn’t want to talk about it. Since coming back to the present, with memories that threatened to overwhelm her if they fully surfaced, she’d studiously avoided speaking anything too emotional about her clan out loud. She was terrified that, if she did, she wouldn’t be able to stop, and words would become sobs, would become screams.

Asha moved up and silently activated the object, feeling a slight pull in her hand as rift energy sparked and swelled within the globe. She’d never seen anything like it in the ruins they’d explored in the Free Marches. It felt wrong for her knowledge to surpass Deshanna’s in any way - she wanted to look to her side and find her mentor there, loaded up with some indeterminable lore about what exactly she was seeing, that she’d stop listening to about ten seconds in. 

“We can… leave you for a moment?” it was perhaps the first time Solas had ever sounded uncertain.

Asha shook her head silently, hugging her arms and backed away from the globe so that it wouldn’t illuminate the tracks on her face. She wiped at them, willing her traitorous eyes to stop leaking. "This place means nothing to me," she replied shortly.

“It seems the ancestors left something for me as well,” crowed Mihris, from the corner. “Interesting.”

“We should take that for the Inquisition,” grumbled Cass from the corner. Her templar was showing a little, in the distrustful way she watched the apostate.

Asha shook her head and muttered, “let her have it.” The way the woman crouched, rooting through the dirt and making little hums of discovery, was so like Deshanna that Asha felt a little sick. Maybe the two of them had known each other. She didn’t dare ask. 

She moved into the shadow and pressed her hand against one of the slick walls. This ruin held so much more in it than any of the others she’d encountered. But Asha thought that, even with the veilfire and the press of magic from all sides, it felt just as empty. Only now the loss held more resonance for her, a personal absence that latched itself into her chest like a splinter she couldn’t dislodge. Was that the conversation she was supposed to be having with these long lost remnants of her people’s past? One of utter bereavement? If that was the story they had told Deshanna, why had the woman kept coming back?

Unfortunately, there was no one left to ask.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! It seems like my update schedule is consistently becoming Sunday/Monday, though I'll keep aiming for two chapters a week! I was away this weekend so unable to edit them down before now.
> 
> No author's notes for this chapter, but I just wanted to say very quickly: I hope everyone is doing ok! Not to date this fic too much, but I'm based in the UK and we've just had a shitty, anxiety inducing week due to the coronavirus, and capitalism being awful. To everyone reading this fic, I hope you're all safe, and that maybe these chapters at least brighten your day a little (and offer a good 43k to bingeread if you are inside self-isolating.) Look after yourselves, as best you can in this capitalist hellscape! <3


	15. Chapter Fifteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha gets drunk. That is all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: alcohol

“But Solas, did the people that the spirit drew together actually stay together?” Cassandra’s voice was filled with desperate hope.

“And what about all the lovelorn girls that needed other _girls_? What did the Matchmaker do then? Come on, Solas, the people need to know!” Came Asha’s demand, followed by laughter.

Cullen looked up from the reports he’d just been handed by his assistant, glancing over the heads of his training recruits. Leliana had informed him to expect the return of the Herald and her companions that day, but it took a few moments for him to match the glimpse he got of the smiling, laughing woman on horseback with the pale, faded version who’d fled from Haven as soon as she was able to, a month before. Her face was dirt smudged and sweaty, and her hair unkempt, as she rode past him to dismount by the stables. But even from a distance, she somehow looked a hundred times better than the wan shadow who’d watched him with terrified eyes in the war room.

Seeing the stranger smile and kiss the muzzle of her horse before handing the reins over to stablehand, he made a snap decision that even he didn’t fully understand. Carefully, so as not to draw his troops’ attention to the deliberateness of the action, he swung around the corner of the nearest tent, and hid himself from her view.

After all, he didn’t want to ruin her day.

The first week after the Herald had left, Cullen had hoped her distance would allow him to discuss contacting the Templars with Leliana in a sensible manner, without inciting the same fraught mess of emotion that had happened the first time he broached the topic. He could now clearly see that allying with the Templars alone would not work, so long as the Inquisition also relied on the Herald and her anchor, but still he couldn’t fight his dread at the idea of allowing mages access to the Breach unchecked. 

But as he’d opened up the debate with the Nightingale, laying out his concerns in a rehearsed, perfunctory manner, he couldn’t fight the guilt that welled up with him, wearing the terrified face of Asha Lavellan in his mind. The same woman who’d had the reckless courage to hit a demon in the face and just _hope it would work_ had gone deathly pale at the thought of even interacting with a Templar. How could he inflict that kind of suffering on someone, willingly? 

Even Leliana could see that, by the end, even he didn’t have any justification in his own cause, and their conversation had ended with him practically talking himself out of his own argument. They'd decided to contact a few Templars he trusted and invite them to join the Inquisition, with the Herald’s permission as per the conditions she’d laid out when asked to stay. It would calm his fears of mages interacting with the Breach without any precautions in place, and… well, meant that the Templars as a whole were not invited into their organisation. For some reason, that had felt like the right decision. And then… he’d left the Nightingale’s office, resigned to the fact that they would probably be working closely with the rebels mages some time in the future.

He knew he was being irrational. His concerns about the mages were well founded - he knew that logically - and yet he couldn’t bring himself to voice them again. His own guilt and fear and shame around the events at both Kinloch and Kirkwall were entirely separate from the atrocity committed against Clan Lavellan, and yet the two seemed irrevocably linked. Was it because he saw Lavellan’s nightmare vision of violent Templar zealots as the darker timeline of his own life? If the fanatical edge that had been born from the demons’ torment in the Ferelden Circle had been allowed to fester, would he have ended up committing a similar crime?

He could argue to himself that he was merely honouring the Herald’s wishes, in line with the Inquisition’s policy, but his surrendering the prospects of a templar alliance didn’t feel entirely like a business decision. What _exactly_ was he trying to prove to himself?

“I should go speak to Leliana and inform her of our progress,” came Cass’s imperious voice.

“Do I…?” Even Cullen could hear the reluctance in the Herald’s voice from here.

“Of course not. Though there will be a meeting tomorrow, which you will be required to attend.”

“Drinks tonight, though, Flash! Don’t forget, you promised!”

“Flash is _not_ a thing!”

“I regret to inform you, _lethallan_ , that 'Flash' is most definitely a thing.”

“Everyone is going to think I _exposed_ myself or something!”

“Is that where your mind goes, Asha? I’m scandalised." Varric laughed.

“Shut up, you! Solas, let’s go fucking meditate.”

“Spoken with the wisdom of the ages.” Solas observed.

“Damn straight it was. Come on.”

"Yes, _hahren_."

"That's 'First' to you, asshole."

Cullen peered around the tent to watch the Herald and Solas begin walking their way down from the stables towards the clearing that Asha had claimed as her own practice ground. So, the chance of their awkwardly meeting had passed, and he stepped back into his place among the sparring recruits. 

She was grinning broadly at the fellow mage, and walking with confidence. Cassandra’s reports had been a little less professional than Leliana traditionally liked, and had made it clear - alongside the notes on their party's progress - that the Herald was falling more comfortably into her role within the Inquisition than she had in those first few weeks following the close of the Breach. Rather than treating it as a divine calling or vocation, she'd apparently found her place by making heraldry into something more of a job that she was actually just quite good at. 

Asha was midway through asking a question of her companion when she saw him on the hill. He noticed her tense, and cursed himself. He should’ve just gone into one of the tents until he was sure she was gone. He wondered if he should wave, but thought better of it at the sight of her expression as she deliberately turned back to Solas. She squared her shoulders, instinctively defensive and pointedly indifferent to his presence.

Well, it was confirmed. She hated him. And again, he asked himself, could he blame her?

 _Andraste preserve me,_ he thought, immediately looking down at the report in his hand as if it was the most important thing in Thedas. _“Should I wave…”_

Asha’s brain felt like a wrung out rag, even before she made it to Flissa’s tavern. She was glad that Solas had let her borrow him for another hour, though she hoped she wasn’t transparent enough for her friend to tell she was worried about what being back in Haven would do to her shakey sense of self-control. Meditation had felt necessary, but all it had dredged up were her fears. She hadn’t been able to achieve the second step of actually quelling them.

 _Doesn’t help that Cullen Rutherford is just waiting for me to slip up,_ she thought, remembering how the Commander had been watching the two apostates earlier, probably looking for an excuse to pounce and call down an Order battalion on them.

She wanted nothing more than to go back to her room and hunker down under a surplus of blankets. But she’d promised Varric drinks, and if she avoided him anymore she was worried he’d think she didn’t like him.

She _loved_ Varric. Only… she wished the dwarf hadn’t noticed that she didn’t participate in the general tipsiness that had purveyed the Inquisition’s Crossroad camp in the last week of their stay, once things in the region had begun to properly stabilise and the scouts felt safe enough to let off steam after months of hard, grim, and unforgiving work. The first night had been after they’d finally cleared out the rebel templar encampment, and so she hadn’t needed an excuse. They’d taken extra Inquisition scouts with them on that mission so that she could stay far at the back in a support role, but it had still been... a lot. She’d made sure she’d never struck a killing blow, but she’d had to admit her elation at stamping out their presence in the Hinterlands had been an emotion she was still struggling to process. Her dreams had been full of blood ever since.

The second night she’d pleaded a headache, and that had been her downfall. If she’d just said she didn’t drink alcohol, or hadn’t used up one of the least reusable excuses so early, maybe it wouldn’t have become a thing…

It had taken all of three days for Varric to notice that she nursed her cups and never had more than two tankards. Assuming that she was still feeling insecure, or possibly didn’t want to embarrass herself amongst the other recruits, he’d made her promise to properly celebrate their first night back in Haven, once they were off-duty. 

She hadn’t thought of a way to say no. She wasn’t sure if she really wanted to refuse. Asha _did_ drink. She used to get thoroughly wasted on Dalish wine and cider, and had once gotten so sick on a batch of homebrew moonshine that she was _pretty_ sure Deshanna had threatened to revoke her succession. But since coming back…

She was worried it would be too much like tranquility. That the blacked out patches of memory and the faded, far off quality the world sometimes took when one was sloshed would feel dangerously familiar.

Still, she couldn’t pretend that the tavern wasn’t wonderful after so many weeks suffering through wind and rain and mud in their various pitched camps. The warmth that built in the room from the fire and the press of bodies was inviting, and the food, while pretty plain, was actually _seasoned_ , sitting heavy and dense in her stomach. Flissa’s musician was good, and Varric had still, somehow, more stories to tell about Hawke. She listened with rapt attention as she felt a sense of calm come over her. Not the calm of a homecoming, exactly, but more that sense of relaxation that accompanied a holiday. 

She was on her third cup when Solas joined them, claiming that he was going to abstain that night. “Living up to the name, Chuckles,” Varric grumbled, but the mage soon distracted him by thoroughly fucking him over in a game of Diamondback, and suddenly Varric’s attention was entirely on the game and he was having the most fun out of everybody. Knowing that there would be a sober person in the party who might also notice if her magic went a bit haywire, Asha acquiesced to the fourth cup. She was draining the dregs of it when Cassandra entered, and she was surprised to see that she had Lady Montilyet in tow.

“I hope I’m not intruding,” the ambassador said, her hands fluttering nervously around her as Cass pulled up a fifth chair.

The question was directed at the table, but even Asha could tell that the woman’s gaze was mostly resting on her. “ _Andaran Atish’an_ ,” she said, echoing Josephine’s first words to her with what she hoped was her best non-threatening ‘I promise I’m not going to zap you with lightning’ smile.

The woman didn’t even bother to hide her relief. “ _Ma serannas_... am I saying that right?”

“No complaints from me either, Ruffles.” Varric grinned, “we could always stand to have some more... lively company.” He cast a meaningful glance at the bottle of Flames of Our Lady that the woman had bought for the table, after a flustered explanation of it being a bonus for a job well done in the Hinterlands. 

“And I could always stand to speak with people who don’t want to simply fill my ears with complaints,” Josephine said with a small huff - which Asha guessed might be the closest the woman got to discontent. “I’m more than glad that the Commander sends them my way after the shouting match he had with Roderick, but I always find it frightfully _convenient_ how Leliana seems to let the shadows swallow her as soon as I’ve told her she can’t stab the person in question.”

“Cullen had a shouting match?” Cass asked.

“Roderick was... well, I probably should say something like ‘provoking unrest’ but Leliana would prefer to say ‘shit stirring’,” the ambassador’s cheeks pinked adorably at her use of uncouth language, as she began passing out glass tumblers and pouring measures of amber liquor into each. “As mages from the Hinterlands begin to join the Inquisition, some of the former templars have expressed discontent. The only person they respect is the Commander, so we sent him to deal with it. But then Roderick started saying things about ‘how can the Herald bring order when she’s not even here’... ah, sorry Asha.”

“No offence taken,” Asha sighed. “I don’t expect the Chancellor will ever be joining my cult anytime soon.”

“Please refrain from calling it a cult in public,” Josephine said, with a worried glance at the other tavern patrons.

“So you admit it’s a cult?” Asha said with a grin.

“No! that’s not what I-”

“Asha has done more to restore order in the last month than I bet Chancellor Roderick did in the last five years of his appointment!” Cass grunted, knocking back her tumbler in one gulp.

Asha took this as a cue on how to drink the thing, and tried to follow suit. The Creators punished her foolhardiness with the fiery burn that lanced its way down her throat, causing her to cough and sputter as tears leaked out of the side of her eyes.

“Are you all right, Asha?” Josephine looked vaguely terrified, “oh gosh, did I bring the wrong drink?”

“Damn, Flash, it’s called ‘Flames of our Lady’ for a reason.”

“Please, ignore me,” she wheezed, as Solas wordlessly pushed over a glass of water that she refused, mostly out of pride. “Continue with your story.”

“Yes, well, the Commander and you are of the same mind, Cassandra,” Josephine said, “only he said his piece _very loudly_. In front of a crowd of Roderick’s supporters. And then Roderick started insinuating that you’d been made tranquil for a reason, and then, well the Commander said that that sort of thinking demonstrated why ‘a tranquil mage had been deemed more worthy of an invitation to the Conclave than you’.”

“Ouch,” said Varric.

“ _Ouch,_ ,” echoed Asha, more emphatically, “I feel like I should be offended. Should I be offended?”

“And did the Commander manage to placate his recruits?” Solas asked calmly. Asha did not miss the sidelong glance he gave her, as if he was asking the question for her benefit.

“If by that you mean ‘did he manage to solve one problem and cause about thirty others’, the answer is yes,” Josephine took a ladylike sip of her own drink, nostrils flaring in one final sigh. She then looked at Asha, and tentatively continued, “utter lack of nuanced communication aside, the Commander is trying his best to ensure that _all_ mages feel welcome here amongst the Inquisition.”

There was silence that pervaded the room for a couple of seconds, and then Varric snorted. “Ever the diplomat, Ruffles.”

“Don’t look at me,” Asha said wryly, trying to skirt the conversation around the fact that she didn’t feel like giving the Commander an accolade for doing what she secretly felt to be the bare minimum. “I’m just imagining the alternate reality where Roderick got my Conclave invitation and ended up as the Herald of Andraste.”

Cassandra led a veritable chorus of disgusted noises.

On her fourth glass of liquor, Asha decided she had been _wrong_. Getting drunk was completely different from being tranquil. Tranquility muted your emotions - getting drunk just muffled the world so that you could feel all of your feelings all the more strongly, and for some reason that didn’t scare her like it did when she was caught by a fierce wave of them in the heat of battle. Maybe it was because everything was so _nice_. Far away from the war torn countryside and the battle cries of mages and templars alike. The world was softened and fuzzy-edged, warm rather than cold, fiery and limned with gold.

“How you doing there, Flash?” Varric grinned, as she slumped her head down on the table, a wide grin on her face.

“M’good,” she murmured muzzily. Maybe it had actually been her fifth glass?

“We shouldn’t have let her finish the bottle,” Josephine muttered to her companions.

“Let the Herald have some fun,” Cass sighed. 

“Not th’Herald,” Asha corrected out of principle, raising her hand up as a point of order while her face still rested on the ale-sticky wood.

“The Hinterlands were dull as balls, Ruffles,” Varric said over the top of her head, “and for whatever reason, she was walking around on tenterhooks. She needed to let loose.”

“Is that your professional opinion?” Solas asked.

“Honestly, I was friends with a traumatised Chosen One half my life, and _half of that_ was spent getting shitfaced in the Hanged Man. I think that makes me a little more qualified than all of you when it comes to things like this.”

“Not a Chosen One,” Asha interjected half-heartedly.

“Yes, yes, Flash. A reformed tranquil with a glowy hand that closes holes in the world - nothing special about that! You can find twenty of you at every bar in Thedas!”

“Mm.”

“Perhaps I should escort her back to her quarters,” Josephine whispered. “The measures you were pouring were um... _quite_ large.”

“No! Don’t wanna,” Asha cried petulantly, sitting up straight and laying a hand flat on the table as the world span a little. “I need you to answer some questions, Lady Montilyet!”

“Like what?” even Cassandra was smirking now.

“I promise you can ask anything, Asha. Within reason. And within reasonable volume,” Josephine glanced around the bar worriedly, again.

“Will you even remember the answers to your questions, Flash?”

“There’s one thing that I… absolutely… need to know!” Asha placed her hands out in a ‘silence’ gesture, until the table hushed in anticipation. Once they seemed suitably hushed, even though she could see their damn lips were twitched, she turned to the ambassador, “Josephine Montilyet: why does the Inquish - the Inquisish - why do you only hire pretty people?!”

Josephine’s eyes widened,“... I don’t… I’m not sure I quite follow, Asha.”

“Everyone here is just so unreasonably attractive!” Asha replied, throwing up her hands. 

That was when the sniggering started. Solas, Creators damn him, was actually the first one to let out a harsh bark of laughter, that seemed to surprise even him.

“I’m serious!” she said emphatically, “M’not being vain, I know I got in cuz’ this” she waved her glowy fingers, “... but everybody in this damn place is so nice-looking! All of you” she made a twirling gesture with her hands to encompass the whole table, before listing off everyone else she could name, “Scout Harding. Leliana. Even th’Commander-”

“- _even the Commander_.” Varric echoed with glee.

“You’re all so pretty!” Asha confessed, trying to convey the significance of this to the group, “You know this, right? S’not fair. Do demons not like pretty people? Does the chantry not condone hotness? Oohh... is it a diplomatic strategy thing?”

Josephine’s face was so adorably pink at this point, which was just proving Asha’s point. Then the table erupted into laughter, and she realised she’d voiced that particular observation aloud.

“I mean, we don’t hire deliberately… that is, based on appearance, we obviously hire _deliberately_ ,” Josephine babbled, “I mean, a lot of the initial appointments were done via letters of recommendation, so we didn’t even see anyone before they arrived in Haven - Oh goodness-”

“- Now, now, Ruffles, I think we’re glossing over the most important issue here,” Varric interrupted, with a shit-eating grin, “Flash, tell me, who’s the prettiest person, then, in this Inquisition of Verifiable Hotness?”

Asha snorted. As if that was even a question that needed to be asked! “Cassandra, _obviiiously_.”

“Oh goodness,” Josephine repeated, as Varric cackled with delight, like it was the best answer he could’ve hoped for. Asha watched Cass’ face with innocent, wide-eyed curiosity as the Seeker went beet red with mortification, and all but face-planted onto the table, covering her head with her hands. It didn’t hide the blushing though. Even the tips of her ears were red, peeking out from her crop of dark hair.

“Oh don’t worry, Cass,” Asha said with a smile, reaching over and patting the top of her head affectionately, in a way she hoped was comforting, “it’s also sooo obvious you don’t like girls.”

“You hear that, Seeker?” Varric asked innocently, “it seems your virtue is safe for another day.” 

“Please. _Stop._ Talking!" 

The Seeker's voice came out terse, to say the least.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! The light-hearted shit I promised! I love watching my characters make drunken fools of themselves :') I felt like Asha wasn't quite delivering on my promise of a 'disaster bisexual' OC.
> 
> I cannot believe I've gotten to this kind of wordcount and we've only just finished the Hinterlands. And we haven't even got to proper romance yet, just endless multishipper hell. My aim is for roughly 100k per act of the game, now that I've got a rough idea of my writing progress - but who knows how much my additional plots will add, when the time comes? So yeah, I hope anyone who's reading this is a fan of long fics. I know I am, but this is already getting way out of hand in relation to my original plans lol.
> 
> Oh shit! Actual notes for the chapter: I know the conversation Asha is having with Solas at the beginning is a bit out of sync with where it falls in game dialogue. But I thought the best way to show how comfortable Asha had gotten with Cassandra was to include a conversation about magic that goes a bit into realms a standard templar would probably be shifty about. And you know that there's basically only one conversation that Solas has about spirits that Cassandra Pentaghast would get **fully invested** in, so....


	16. Chapter Sixteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha continues to be drunk, and pays for it the next day.

The night air was cold as Cullen left the Chantry. It had been a long, arduous meeting - mostly because Leliana had taken advantage of the Herald’s declined invitation to interrogate Cassandra on her progress. 

“She’s hardworking and diligent,” Cassandra had reported in a business-like tone. “She dislikes attention. She is good at negotiating with people… but only if she respects them. It takes a toll on her otherwise. She much prefers performing deeds silently without claiming any notice.”

“A laudable attribute, were we not trying to build renown throughout the whole of Thedas,” Jospehine observed, with all of the exhaustion of a diplomat forced daily to wrangle task-oriented soldiers and spies into something friendly and respectable.

“She is good with people, but I’m not sure it is precisely the way you need, Ambassador,” Cassandra shrugged, “better than me, at least.”

“Does she have ties within the Inquisition?” Leliana asked, “Enough to want to stay?”

“She is close with Solas. They train together every day,” Cassandra replied, “She enjoys Varric’s company, but he asks too many questions about her past. I _hope_ she likes me…”

“We can’t really leverage that,” grumbled Leliana. “Solas could leave at any time.”

“They all treat her like a person,” said Cassandra with a shrug, “that is all she wants, I think. She avoids the pilgrims like the plague.”

“We _are_ a religious organisation.” Cullen felt the need to point out.

“A religion she does not follow, Commander,” Josie countered.

“My point exactly. I was just observing that if we’re trying to ‘bring her into’ the Inquisition we’re going to be fighting an uphill battle-“

“Do you have any causes for concern?” Leliana interjected, looking to Cassandra.

The Seeker hesitated, before saying, “No. Not really." she swallowed, "it’s probably nothing, but… she has mood swings.”

“Mood swings?”

“It’s probably nothing,” Cassandra repeated hurriedly. “...most of the time she is as you saw at the Breach - joking, happy, good tempered, a little reckless. But her behaviour is… erratic. She hates killing, but at other times she’ll be gripped by a fury that makes her more violent than anyone else on the field. She has nightmares, she’s often scared, and every time she sees a… well, a templar… something dark comes over her. Either terror, or anger, or bloodlust, perhaps a combination of all three. She’s aware of it - I gather that the work she is doing with Solas is to control them, but-”

“-but in any other context these would be taken as signs of a potentially dangerous abomination,” Leliana said, and even Cullen could tell she voiced that aloud so he didn’t have to be the one to say it.

“I also can’t help but notice that-” Cassandra swallowed, “well, she does not talk about her clan. To anybody. The things she’s seen… it is clear she is avoiding the issue. I do not think she has grieved, and when she does, all this might…”

“Simply get worse.” Cullen surprised himself by speaking.

“Exactly. I think she is a good person, but good people can struggle.” Cassandra studiously avoided his gaze as she said this.

After she had left with Josephine, he and Leliana had stayed up late discussing the logistics of an escort for the Herald’s upcoming trip to Val Royeaux, not yet discussed with the Herald herself. It had been decided that Asha should be given an honour guard for her peace of mind, in what even Cullen could admit was a bit of a templar stronghold. But picking that honour guard had its own issues, given that half his current recruits were untrained, and the other half were nearly all templars themselves. He and the Nightingale had been haggling over who exactly to send, and they’d only realised how late it had gotten once one of their candles began guttering out, burned to the quick.

He was walking back down to his tent on the training grounds, hunched up as his breath fogged in the chill, when he heard the scuffling and saw two figures ahead walking in the moonlight. One weaved erratically on the trail, and nearly overbalanced every few seconds until their taller companion stepped in to steady them with a single hand.

“You’re not mad, are you?” the weaving one asked plaintively, voice slurred. Cullen froze - recognising the Herald,and realising that she was headed right this way, albeit by a very circuitous, winding route.

“Not at all, _lethallan_.”

“It’s just Cassandra _is_ the prettiest,” Asha told him in a very sincere tone.

“And I’m sure she was greatly touched by your effusive compliments on her appearance,” came Solas’ wry rejoinder.

“It’s the scar. And the little plait. Plus, she has a sword!”

“I've noticed.”

“It’s just… if you’re not mad, why’d we have to leave?”

“The tavern is closed, Asha.”

“Ughhhh,” she made a very theatrical gesture of frustration with her hands, and then nearly toppled over with the momentum as Solas rushed to right her, “ _shemlen_.”

“Indeed.”

"Clan Lavellan _never_ ended a party before sunrise!"

It was then, as they were both getting closer, that Cullen decided he was going to do the sensible, professional thing. He crouched and hid behind the nearest wall.

“Do you ever… do the thing?” he heard Asha ask muzzily.

“...the thing?” Cullen was grateful that even Solas sounded thoroughly perplexed by that. He’d been vaguely worried that he was about to become an unwilling witness to an incredibly clumsy proposition.

“You know, when you’re drunk,” Asha continued, oblivious to the double meaning in her words, “the drunk mage thing.”

“...I’m not sure I follow. Can I possibly hope that it’s ‘the thing’ where you mind-blast yourself and you’re instantly sober?”

“No, silly!” Asha giggled, and it was the kind of mischievous giggle that Cullen, as a man with siblings, knew to immediately fear. He peered round the corner of his… well, his wall… and watched as the Herald extended her hands forwards, wiggling her fingers, and began to concentrate on them, her absorption and the alcohol meaning that she was so focused on the task that she didn’t notice when she began to cant to the right slightly.

Slowly, her fingertips began to glow bright blue, and the glow crawled up her arms, mixing to turquoise with the light of the anchor and illuminating her delighted face. The sound of crackling ice filled the silence, as a frost began to crystallise along her forearms. “Being drunk meannns you don’t feel the cold,” she sing-songed at her companion, twirling her hands in the air so that they left blue tinged silver after images in the air. “Which means…”

“Asha,” Solas’ voice held all the trepidation Cullen currently felt.

Asha extended her hands again until they were in front of her, and then… grabbed hold of the air, and _pulled_ herself forward.

There was a flash as her figure blurred, and when Cullen blinked away the flare of light he saw that the Herald was no longer standing next to Solas at all. Solas looked similarly confused, casting his eyes frantically around to try and find her.

“You can fade step soooo much further!” came a gleeful cry from an unexpectedly great distance. Cullen spun round to the source of the noise, squinting in the dark, and saw a silhouetted figure and a sphere of green light moving on the top of Adan’s hut, on the opposite side of the courtyard. The Herald stood triumphantly on the roof, waving her hands to get Solas’ attention.

“ _Fenedhis,_ ” the elf cursed under his breath, before shouting, “Asha, get down! Just because you can’t _feel_ the cold doesn’t mean-”

There was a flash and the Herald was at his side again. “Boooooo!” she said, and then continued, in a voice that was clearly a terrible mimicry of Varric’s, “way to live up to your name, Chuckles.”

“Says the woman who is shivering,” replied Solas, with tired, threadbare patience.

“Am I?” Cullen could hear the Herald’s teeth chattering from here.

“ _Vyn esaya gera assan i’mar’av’ingala._ ” Solas sighed, as he forcibly bundled her coat around her like a parent getting their child ready for a snow day.

“RUDE!”

“Let’s get you to bed.”

Solas finally managed to cajole the Herald down the path back to her room. Cullen was grateful, as even his legs were starting to ache from crouching in the weight of his armour. He was still struggling to equate this woman with the person who had left Haven, and was worried to find himself feeling something akin to childish jealousy. He couldn’t work out if he wanted to have her laugh and joke that way around him, or if he was simply envious of those who had the ability to make her act in such a way. He’d always been awkward. Maybe if he’d handled their first meetings better, she’d not be so eager to avoid him now. It was hard to admit that their disagreement might be an issue of personality, rather than the fact he was a templar. But that was such a foolish, selfish thought, that he was angry at himself for even having in the first place. The Herald had legitimate reasons to distance herself from him. He wouldn’t ever have considered himself to have much of an ego, but apparently he had enough of one to get bruised.

He wondered briefly if Solas had taken a liking to the Herald. Her behaviour around the other man had been… endearing.

He brushed the thought away.

At least, he tried to. But the further he got through Haven, the more images of the Herald gleefully encasing herself in glowing ice, and then drunkenly shivering, seemed to occupy his thoughts. It wasn’t until he’d gone into the troops’ supply tent and found another blanket that he realised he really did plan to trudge all the way up the hill again.

 _It’s a business-like concern,_ he thought. It would be _embarrassing_ , to say the least, for all this to have happened and then for the Herald of Andraste to die of acute chill from an act of drunken stupidity. It would hardly paint her as the glowing figurehead of Divine order that the Inquisition was setting her up to be.

 _She’s not even going to want to see me_ , he thought. But Cullen continued up the hill anyway, back to the cabin where Asha was staying.

He didn’t know whether to be even more mortified or relieved when the person who opened the door wasn’t the Herald, but her newly assigned roommate, one of the newly trained Inquisition scouts who wore a scowl that told him this was definitely not the first time she’d been woken that night. Hopefully there wouldn’t be too much time for resentment - she wasn’t going to be there long, and in fact was getting deployed to the Fallow Marshes within the week.

“I… well,” Cullen just held the blanket out in front of him for her to take, “for the Herald.”

“Whatever,” replied the woman, bluntly. She snatched it from him, and then slammed the door in his face, the late hour not giving her any particular tact. He wondered if she even registered that he was technically her commanding officer.

 _Oh well,_ he sighed. At least this way his act of kindness would go unnoticed by Asha Lavellan.

The next morning was, well, full of regret.

Asha didn’t remember coming home. Nor did she remember cocooning herself inside three blankets - especially since she only recalled having requisitioned two. She desperately hoped some poor sleeping recruit hadn’t had their equipment stolen off their back by a drunk Herald - that would not do much to recommend her as the figurehead the Inquisition so desperately wanted. 

The waking up, however, she experienced with full clarity. Her head felt heavy and leaden, like it was wrapped up in thick, sodden wool, and her mouth tasted like soured paint thinner. She considered briefly mind-blasting herself, but couldn’t face it. While the spell did get rid of a lot of the symptoms of a hangover, the actual process of casting it - building up the wave of dizzying energy that you planned to expel - sent your mind reeling a little, and Asha’s mind was already doing that without any magical help. She was pretty sure she’d puke if she tried. Not to mention that she’d have to move out of bed and out of the cabin to cast it. She decided it would be a much better solution to simply burrow deeper into her covers and sleep for another eternity.

It was as she was drifting off again into merciful darkness that she remembered. She had training with Cassandra to attend.

She pulled herself up to sitting with great difficulty, and a massive groan. Luckily, there was a health potion resting at the edge of her bed, left by some benevolent soul, and she chugged it down without a second thought to the expense or who might have left it there. The bitter taste made her grimace but her stomach began to settle, her headache lessening by degrees. She pulled herself out of bed, realising she was still fully clothed even down to her boots. Her roommate was gone, which meant it was after morning training was supposed to start, but she was pleased to see that the daylight was still weak enough to herald an early-ish morning as she changed out of last night’s shirt into a sleeveless vest and jacket. She’d almost definitely missed their allotted training time, but she hoped she’d at least get some recognition for the effort of turning up at all. 

Although no formal plans had been made, she knew to seek the other woman out on the training ground. She made her way out of Haven, tying up her stringy, slightly greasy hair in a leather tie. She’d be winning no beauty contests, but she’d wash off the sweat and alcohol stink after this session of brutal torture. _It’ll be fine,_ she thought, with one last longing thought back to her warm bed. When she was younger, she’d been dragged on hunts where she was still so sick from the night before that she’d often had to go vomit discretely in a bush, under the very thin guise of ‘looking for tracks’. With a health potion in her, she was hopeful she’d at least survive Cass’ training, although it would probably be grim as fuck all the same.

She saw Cassandra on the training ground among the tents. To her dismay, she saw the woman was deep in discussion with Commander Cullen. She would ratheravoid him, but technically this didn’t breach her rule of always having another person present when they interacted, so she couldn’t find a viable excuse. She steeled herself and walked over across the packed dirt, hoping she didn’t look as green and queasy as she felt. The space was unexpectedly empty: the usual hordes of sparring recruits were absent, probably doing their morning drills which Asha had heard, with horror, involved a six mile perimeter run before the exercises even properly started.

She noticed the moment Cass spotted her, if only because the _oddest_ thing happened. At the moment of eye contact, Asha waved, and then watched in confusion as the other woman’s face began to bloom into the brightest, deepest blush, unlike anything Asha had ever seen in all their weeks of working together. Had Cassandra been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to? Oh gods, _did she like Cullen?_

“Good morning,” Asha said with enthusiasm she absolutely did not feel, hoping to overcome the awkwardness. 

“You’re up early,” the Commander noted, with undisguised surprise. Even though the greeting had not been directed at him.

“Not really,” Asha replied, pleased when she managed to keep her voice level and not immediately resorting to petty retorts. “I’m meant to be reporting for training, and it seems like I’m the last one here.” She turned towards her friend pointedly, hoping the woman would save her from further conversation, “Where do you want me, Cassandra?”

The Seeker didn't notice the deliberate nature of Asha's action, on account of her desperately avoiding eye contact.“Um… I mean… yes… that is… a question.”

Asha cast a quick, unwilling glance at Cullen to see if the man could offer any insight into what exactly had happened to Cassandra Pentaghast, whose blush had only seemed to worsen once she began her stuttered attempt at speaking. But he was also looking at his colleague with equal confusion, as if she’d grown an extra head. 

“Are there weights?” Asha tried to offer helpfully, “is that what strength training involves? Weights?”

“Are... are you sure we should start today? After…” Cass trailed off, looking like she wanted the ground to swallow her whole.

“After I got absolutely shitfaced?” Asha supplied, with a slightly apologetic smile, “I’m a big girl, Cass. I’m sure I deserve to deal with the consequences of my own terrible decisions, up to and including being sick in the grass. Regardless of how awful I feel today, I need to get better. I don’t mind if you don’t!”

“Oh, so you remember…?” for a second Cass almost looked pained.

“I remember Josephine bringing Flames of Our Lady…” It was then that Asha only began to contemplate the implications posed by the holes in her memory. She’d been in such a rush to get up and out to keep her promise and prove her dedication, that she hadn’t really dwelled on what might have happened in the lead up to her hangover. “Oh no - did I do something? Did I say something? Did I kiss someone? Oh gods… did I _sing_?”

“So you _don’t_ remember when you asked Josephine…?”

The Commander was watching the whole exchange with interest. Asha had wondered if it was possible for Cass to look any more embarrassed, but somehow it happened.

“Oh no! I _did_ do something!” Asha cried. “Do I need to apologise to you? Do I need to apologise to Lady Montilyet?”

“It is fine.”

“Did I proposition her? Did she speak elven again?”

Cassandra quirked her head then, as if that hadn’t even been an option she had considered, and Asha felt her own face going red with embarrassment. “Let us not dwell on it. As I said, it is fine.”

“It’s clearly not - Cassandra, you look like a _tomato_.”

Cullen coughed, loudly, looking choked as he tried to hide a snigger.

“Let us speak no more of it.” Cass said in a strained voice. “As you say, I don’t mind it if you don’t.”

“Oh Creators, did I ask if you and Varric were a thing? That seems like the kind of thing drunk-me would do.”

The Commander let out another cough, and then, horrifyingly, began to speak. "I think this might, actually, pertain to something about 'effusive compliments' of a person's appeara-"

“Let us begin!” Asha didn’t think it would ever have been possible for Cass’ deep, sonorous voice to become shrill, but that was the only word she could find to describe it.

Asha collapsed into the dirt, her arms feeling weak, like overcooked vegetables. She’d only managed about half of the required repetitions of that particular exercise, but then she’d kind of accepted that this would border on a near death experience the moment she’d only managed five of the requested twenty press-ups. She’d thought her staff patterns had been tiring out her muscles, but Cass’ training introduced her to muscles she wasn’t even aware she had, and then stretched them to breaking point. She was a sweaty, gross mess, and pretty certain that if there was anything in her stomach she would’ve indeed thrown up by now. Whatever she’d done to the Seeker when drunk must’ve truly been terrible - there was no way that this was her normal exercise routine?

 _I guess all those gorgeous muscles had to come from somewhere,_ Asha thought dazedly, as she panted desperately to regain her breath.

“Normally, I would suggest a run,” the Seeker said from somewhere outside Asha’s vision, in that same business-like tone she’d seemed to decide would overcome their one-sided awkwardness that Asha still was yet to learn the source of, “but given the kinds of distances we covered in the Hinterlands, I don’t think it is quite necessary to include it as part of your regimen, at least not while we’re still on active duty.”

“Oh... yay?” Asha said weakly, not really bothering to move her cheek from where it pressed against the ground.

“You did well,” the other woman said, her feet moving into view as she crouched down to help Asha up. She groaned, all the way. Some ‘hero of the people’ she was. Asha didn’t even want to consider what she looked like, red faced and reeking of sweat and stale alcohol. She decided instead to simply congratulate herself on not retching the moment she righted herself, stumbling into Cass.

“Oh!” Cass moved immediately away, “my apologies, Herald.”

“Not the Herald,” Asha reminded her, making a mental note to ask Varric exactly what she’d done last night. If it was truly as embarrassing as Cassandra’s behaviour suggested, she was sure the dwarf would have a lot of fun recounting it to her, and at least that would mean she didn't have to resort to asking _Cullen_. With a sigh and stretch that she immediately regretted, she moved over to the trough of water that sat nearby. The recruits had returned from their run somewhere in the blur of excruciating activity, and a set of reusable containers sat next to it for people to retrieve drinks. Asha filled up a mug, briefly considered chugging it, and then dumped it unceremoniously on her head instead. It was a brutal, icy shock in the middle of the frigid morning air, but did something to make her feel less than two inches from death.

It was only then that she noticed the audience she had developed over what was undoubtedly a pathetic show. The Commander was two hundred or so meters away, watching his own recruits with such a pointed eye that it was pretty obvious he’d been looking anywhere but them moments before. She doubted that this display had done anything to convince him of her skill, so it was good that she no longer gave a shit about impressing him. The others, though, were the ones she was worried about. Messenger runners and the scouts not currently training had clustered at the edge of the practice ground, muttering amongst themselves as they watched their hungover mess of a supposedly glorious leader.

“Oh, kill me now,” she muttered, eyes raised up to the blue sky above, and drained her second tankard.

“You, witch!” 

Asha was quite literally shaken out of her self pity by someone shoving her from the side unexpectedly, as if her prayers had been unwittingly answered. Her tired wibbly legs meant she overbalanced, and then let out a curse as her hip rammed the sharp edge of the water trough, not quite overturning it but sending icy water splashing across the ground and across her clothes. She had barely enough chance to take stock of her surroundings, and the nature of her assailant, before someone was grabbing her by the front of her vest - a blonde soldier with cruel, angry eyes. In armour that bore a blazing sword across his chest plate.

“How dare you pretend at divinity! You make a mockery of our order!” he spat in her face, shaking her like a ragdoll, “how can you be heralded as our saviour when your kind killed the Most Holy!”

“W-what?” Asha choked out weakly, fear ice-bright in her chest. After weeks of fighting rebel templars in the Hinterlands, she was no longer in a full-on panic, but she still felt light headed and dizzy as it mixed with the pain and exhaustion that already warred within her. The attack had come out of nowhere, and she had to fight the hysterical thought, _did my training really go_ that _badly?_

She was trying not to puke right in the man’s face as she began to muster a mind blast to throw him off, when she heard the pounding feet of several people rushing to her aid. There was a barely restrained growl from Cassandra as the Seeker barrelled into the man from the side, in much the same manner as he’d accosted Asha, only this time with enough ferocity to send him sprawling. He dropped his hold on her, but with the momentum Asha was again thrown to the side and into sharp cold metal. This time the trough was fully overturned, the soldier’s body tumbling over it, Cassandra on top of him.

“Stand down, recruit!” came Cullen’s barked order from closeby as Asha, dazed, pulled herself upright. Her clothes were sodden and clinging to her skin. 

“I will not be silent! You might have fooled them, but you haven’t fooled me, you filthy heretic!” the soldier shouted hoarsely from where Cass had pinned him into the dirt. 

Asha looked over at him, fighting the childish tears that sprung to her eyes. Not so much because she was hurt by his words, but more that she was just so fucking tired, and so fucking ill, and so fucking done, already shivering as gooseflesh sprung up on damp skin. She glared at him levelly, forcing out words through gritted teeth, “I’m not fooling anyone. I’ve never claimed to be the Herald of Andraste. I’ve never pretended to be anything other than what I am.”

“A tranquil redeemed?” the soldier barked a bitter laugh, “there’s no such thing. Are we to think that you were sent by Andraste to save us, when the only person who gains from that hole in the sky is you? You’re dangerous. Your kind get the rite for a reason.”

He let out a sharp cry of pain as Cassandra pushed him further into the ground, then kneed him in the stomach for good measure.

“Stand _down_ recruit. You will not be asked a third time.” Came the Commander’s cold voice from disconcertingly close to Asha’s shoulder. A third time? Asha struggled for a second but then put the pieces together - this must’ve been one of the templars who Josephine had said were ‘shit stirring’ while she was still away in the Hinterlands. It seemed the Commander had not done enough to quell Haven’s discontent.

Cold fury thrummed within her. She was tired, hungover with a headache that could split the clouds, exhausted, a little scared - and annoyed that she had to be scared. The agreement she’d come to with Leliana was supposed to _avoid_ things like this, things that made her feel like she needed to be checking over her shoulder constantly for threats, like a hunted thing. She’d let her guard down for a bare moment, allowed herself to show weakness in public, and now she felt exactly that: weak, and humiliated. She was supposed to be making it so that others didn’t have to fight her battles for her.

“Let him get up, Cassandra,” she said, with a quiet authority she wasn’t even aware she possessed. Cass cast a confused glance her way, but what she saw in her face must have answered some of the Seeker’s questions because she got up off of the soldier, pulling him to his feet. When he made another wild lunge for Asha, Cass kept him restrained, holding him from behind in a grapple as she made her way over on unsteady legs, trying to repress the shakes in her body.

“Abomination!” once she was close enough, he spat in her face, a sticky glob landing on her cheek. 

Asha stared at him levelly, lifting her sodden shirt and wiping it away. She was shaking. She heard movement on her left and held up her hand, stilling whoever was about to intervene. She looked at the man levelly, and said, “are you afraid?”

“W-what?”

She felt that cold anger in her chest, heard all of the terrible things it wanted her to do to him. Her magic thrilled through her, painting a thousand pictures of ways this man could die. She wondered if he could see any of them in her face.

“I am going to be kind,” she said, in a voice that she knew was anything but, “and assume that these were the ramblings of a pathetic, scared little man, and not the poison of a murderous zealot.”

He opened his mouth to speak again, and that’s when she decided she didn’t want to hear it. She closed her fist, and cast the smallest winter’s grasp, the kind that replicated the feeling of a morning cold enough that it made you gasp and catch your breath when you took your first lungful of air. She knew his chest would feel heavy with it, and sure enough, his breath came fast as he struggled against the pressure, gifting her a few more moments of peace.

“You say my kind get the rite of tranquility for a reason,” she continued, “is that why you fear me?"

He couldn't answer. She let him gasp some more, like a fish beached on land.

"Do you dwell on what monstrous things I must’ve done, what I must’ve summoned and who I must’ve killed with my magic, to be put down like a dog and stripped clean of my very soul?”

She let the winter’s grasp fall as quickly as it had begun. She made it obvious, as well, magic flaring out and dying as she threw her hand dismissively wide. “I did nothing.” she said bitterly, before raising her voice again, “I’ve made no claim to be blessed by Andraste, but if she did indeed give me this gift of a second chance at life, I can only assume it was because she was horrified by the atrocities _your kind_ ," she pinned her finger onto the flaming sword emblazoned on his chest, "committed in her name, and sought to rectify them. You have a problem with me, I’ll only assume it’s because you don’t want to admit how corrupt your own Order has become,” She stepped forward again, leaning until she was almost nose to nose, despite being a full head shorter, “and if you want a true reason to fear me, know that I don’t need any magic to make you hurt.”

She pulled herself back, raising her fist, and remembered -

_“No, no, gods no, Ash, that’s not how you throw a punch!” cried Mahanon, laughing as they sparred in a forest clearing, dodging away from her nearest blow. “you couldn’t blind a Dread Wolf’s eye with that!”_

_“Oh Creators, help me, Mahanon,” Asha had replied in a deadpan, sarcastic tone, “I’m so very, very weak and have no idea what I’m doing.”_

_“You mages are better sticking to your-”_

_Mahanon’s snide comeback had been halted by Asha muttering a small incantation under her breath, and breaking his nose._

She muttered the same thing now, audible only to herself, and then her fist darted in and punched the soldier right in his bare throat. Not hard enough to break his windpipe, but hard enough to cause bruising and hopefully render him speechless for a few days. Hard enough to make him believe the small lie that would convince him to leave her well alone.

Telekinetic weapons. A pretty pointless depletion of mana, all in all, but the spell had _some_ satisfying applications. 

The man doubled over, coughing and wheezing, and Asha signalled for Cass to let him go. The look the Seeker gave her was one of keen re-evaluation, and she decided to let her know later what she’d actually done - she didn’t want her thinking that this strength training regime would be a waste of time. The soldier was still gasping desperately for breath when she turned, noticing her growing audience with a shudder, and wanting nothing more than to get out from under their gaze.

Cullen was watching her wide eyed, and Asha spared him a single glance as she walked past, shaking out her fist for fear that she’d punch something else otherwise. 

“Control your soldiers, Commander,” she told him coolly, “or the Nightingale does it for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry guys, only one update this week, although it's a long one. A life thing happened - I've got a feeling that lots of 'life things' are happening right now in the world - that meant that this weekend was spent doing other things, with very few chances to work on this. This does at least meant that I'll be going back to even chapter numbers each weekend, which pleases me immensely.
> 
> Notes on artistic spell usage:
> 
> Mind blast - cleansing blast 'removes all negative status effects', so I decided that it would make an (im)perfect in-world hangover cure
> 
> Fade step - I know lots of fics have interpreted this spell differently, but I decided that the reason for the game mechanic that only allows fade step to take place small distances is because, as Asha says, inter-dimensional travel via winter magic is fucking cold.
> 
> Telekinetic weapons - I love Origins spells, and want them in my fic! Telekinetic weapons increases armour penetration, and if fists can be turned into 'holy weapons' in D&D, I'm going to let them be weapons in my fanfic.
> 
> Thanks for reading, stay safe! Love you all!


	17. Chapter Seventeen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha hates Orlais.

_Fuck Orlais_.

Asha was pretty certain, if she could have her vallaslin erased and her face re-tattooed, she might just get that emblazoned across her forehead, to save everyone time. It had rapidly become her mantra over the past few days and certainly there was nothing, right in that moment, that she believed in more.

She’d been relieved to get out of Haven once again after a scant four days in the village, but this new assignment in Val Royeaux was about as far away from her work in the Hinterlands as was possible. In the Hinterlands, it had been about proving her worth through her actions, performing deeds and kindnesses to earn the respect of those around her. Here, she was required to wear the Inquisition like a mantle, acting as the figurehead for a cause because, in the eyes of Orlais, she basically had no value as an individual. Whereas travelling the countryside had felt like freedom, walking into that city felt like walking into a cage, the weight of everyone’s judging eyes heavy on her shoulders. She couldn’t be anything less than immaculate in her manners and dress, she couldn’t use magic, and she couldn’t laugh or joke without heads turning in her direction and a ripple of pointed mutterings regarding uncouth behaviour following on behind. 

She hated it on the first day when her arrival in the city was simply taken as an excuse to bombard her with insults from all sides. She hated it when forced to watch the templars declare their independence, finding herself utterly powerless to do anything about it as she watched on from the sidelines. She’d hated it when she’d looked in the shops for some armour, and then had to go ask Cass to buy it for her because the prices somehow went up by a hundred or so gold when she - with her vallaslin and her knife ears - was the one who asked for them. 

But most of all, she hated it when she met Madame de Fer.

The prospect of securing another mage’s company had been enough to make Asha not entirely balk at the idea of spending a night among the Orlesian nobility, who seemed to regard bigotry as an enjoyable, leisurely sport. Cassandra had loaned her a more formal shirt of deep burgundy red, and Asha hadn’t had the heart to tell the other woman that it was both way too big for her and also possibly one of the worst colours for her still depressingly wan complexion. She’d hoped that slaving away in the Hinterlands would have improved her deathly pallor... but it was only just spring. Days spent under a wet and windy Ferelden sky weren’t going to be bringing her freckles back any time soon.

She felt like a child dressing up in an older sibling’s clothes as she walked into Madame de Fer’s grand mansion and tried not to gape at the grand vaulted ceilings and elaborate decor. She was already out of place and had barely stepped foot inside - she was pretty sure she could sense Josephine shivering like someone had walked over her grave, hundreds of miles away, in the full knowledge that a member of the Inquisition was undoubtedly about to offend a noble who might’ve invested in their cause. Madame de Fer’s invitation hadn’t been something that the Ambassador had planned or prepared her operatives for, so Asha had had to ask both Cass and Varric for advice on how to attend an Orlesian soirée without mortally offending someone. She was pretty sure their instructions on the subject had both been patchy, but in wild and disparate ways that didn’t quite complement the other’s shortfallings. She was, in short, winging it. She’d plaited her hair and polished her boots, but nothing she did could compare with the beautiful lace ballgowns and sparkling, shining masks of the Orlesian elite. She bristled when she saw someone move past in a half mask that mimicked her own vallaslin - these people who would just as easily call her ‘rabbit’ to her face had somehow heard of her attendance, and would seemingly wear such things in an attempt to flatter her.

 _Get in. Give the sales pitch. Get out._ She had tried to send Cass in her place, but it seemed that only the glowing redeemed tranquil was worthy of Lady Vivienne’s attention. Asha hoped it was perhaps because Lady Vivienne felt some sympathy for the suffering of fellow mages, or perhaps had knowledge to offer about the removal of her tranquility firsthand, but it didn’t change the facts. Her name was the one on the invitation, and if there was one thing both Cassandra and Varric had agreed on, it was that you couldn’t turn down the specific requests of Madame de Fer.

“Lady Ashatarsylnin, formerly of Clan Lavellan, representing the Inquisition,” announced the ball’s herald as she stepped across the threshold, making Asha feel a little sick. There was no ‘formerly’ about it, she was still her clan’s First, even if the clan no longer…

 _Not the time._ Asha moved forward into the room, feeling the eyes of everyone heavy upon her. She fought the urge to fiddle with her shirt, keeping her arms tight at her sides in some semblance of composure.

“What a pleasure to meet you, my lady,” said one of the noblemen, stepping forward. Asha decided to interpret his tone as genuinely welcoming, though it held an amused drawling note that she couldn’t help but feel was at her expense. Then again, maybe it was just a requisite part of the Orlesian accent. “Seeing the same faces at every event becomes so tiresome. Are you a guest of Madame de Fer, or are you here for Duke Bastien?”

Asha wasn’t even given a chance to respond before another voice butted in.

“I have heard the most curious tales of you,” said a woman to the man’s right, “I cannot imagine half of them are true.”

“Um…” Asha winced even as she said it. _No hesitations!_ she heard, this time in Josephine’s voice and not Deshanna’s. “Well, what have you heard about me?” 

She couldn’t imagine that her party’s charity work in the Hinterlands was of any particular interest to the people at court.

“Some say when the Veil opened, Andraste herself delivered you from the Fade. Removed your tranquility so that you could be the one to save us all.”

“Ohh… Is that why you are dressed so?” said the first man again, “is it a show of your humble vocation? My lady, are you vying for a Sainthood?”

 _In. Sales pitch. Out._ Asha plastered a false grin onto her face that she hoped didn’t look as pained as she felt. Josephine and Leliana had informed her that in Orlais she had to stick to the Herald narrative, to have any hope of earning the respect of the court, even though she herself felt like it was a cheap play at novelty value. “The tales are a little exaggerated, I’m afraid.” she waited a beat, till she thought they perhaps had begun to look a little disappointed behind their masks, before saying, “we can’t say for certain that the glowing woman who delivered me back into this world was really _Andraste_ , after all.”

The woman let out a small delighted gasp, clasping her hands together like an entertained child being shown a new shiny toy. _Fuck. Orlais._ Asha thought to herself, with feeling.

“The Inquisition should visit more of these parties!” she said, a rapt note in her voice.

“The Inquisition? What a load of pig shit!” Asha looked up to see another man in a mask and a surfeit of lace walking down a staircase to the right of the ballroom, declaring his opinions to the world. “Washed-up sisters, crazed seekers, and abominations claiming divinity? No one can take them seriously. Everyone knows it’s just an excuse for a bunch of political outcasts to grasp for power.”

Honestly, Asha didn’t entirely disagree with him, but the ‘washed-up’, ‘crazed’, ‘abominations’ talk was completely uncalled for. It reminded her uncomfortably of her altercation with the ex-templar in Haven. She gave this man - who was far less threatening, if only because the cut of his pantaloons - what she hoped was a cool look. “The Inquisition is working to restore peace and order to Thedas," she replied. That, at least, she could say without feeling like she was lying. Their work in Haven and at the Crossroads had genuinely helped people.

“Here comes the outsider,”he gestured at her, “restoring peace with an army.”

“You seem awfully fixated on this ‘outsider’ business,” Asha couldn’t help but note, hearing her own doubts about the Inquisition reworded so insidiously, “if I was a human in a year’s salary worth of lace, would you object to me quite so much?”

The man bristled at her tone, and stepped forward until he was entirely too close. “We know what the Inquisition is. If you were a woman of honour, you would step outside and answer these charges.”

Asha opened her mouth to tell him exactly where he could stick his honour in a manner that Orlesian etiquette would probably disparage, when suddenly the man gasped for breath. Asha watched wide-eyed as his flesh became encased in frost, his skin steaming as he panted in pain. For a second, she was worried that _she_ had somehow done it without realising; it reminded her too clearly of what she’d considered doing to the soldier in Haven. _Gods, has my magic gone so wildly out of my control?_

It was only when she glanced around in a panic, and saw the flash of magical energy from the hands of a tall woman at the top of the stairs that she relaxed, and simply became confused. When she’d considered using magic against the templar, she’d decided it was inappropriate and disproportionate retribution, likely to simply result in increased distaste for her within Haven. The fact that the same method was now apparently perfectly acceptable in an Orlesian ballroom - where the social mores were ten times more fucking convoluted - seemed a little incongruous to her.

“My dear marquis, how unkind of you to use such language in my house… to my guest,” the woman said in a clipped, cut-glass voice pitched to carry across the entire scene. Asha watched as a woman in a resplendent costume and elaborate headdress began to descend the stairs with all the grace of walking on air. “You know such rudeness is… intolerable.”

Asha wondered if it was a prerequisite of every Orlesian mansion to have a flight of stairs that facilitated dramatic entrances. Honestly, she _really_ wouldn’t put it past them, as a nation.

“Madame Vivienne,” the man said through trembling, blue-tinged lips, “I humbly beg your pardon.”

“You should. Whatever am I going to do with you, my dear?” Asha couldn’t help but fight a grin at the woman’s tone as she circled the man with cool disdain, tipping a single finger under his chin like he was a prize animal for inspection, before turning to her. Warm brown eyes, so different from her aloof demeanour, regarded Asha with a secret kind of shared amusement. “My lady, you are the ruined party in this unfortunate affair. What would you have me do with this foolish, foolish man?”

Asha gave the frozen man a long, considering look, guiltily savouring the taste of power as he trembled, the fear plain on his face. Lady Vivienne’s unashamed and unrepentant display of magical strength in full view of the entire ballroom sent a small thrill through her. She cast a glance at the woman’s hand, theatrically outstretched as she waited for Asha’s response. If she gave the command, would the man really shatter into pieces in front of her? It was almost the complete opposite to how she’d felt in Haven, when Cassandra and Cullen had had to rush to her aid, and with a heady rush she realised that, unlike then, making this killing blow would have basically no consequences.

But as with Haven, she couldn’t bring herself to actually make that decision. She took a heavy, steadying breath, trying to quell the hungry need for power within her. “Nothing more, Lady Vivienne. I think he’s feeling… thoroughly foolish,” she replied shakily. “And I hope he’s learnt not to question my honour again.”

Lady Vivienne gave her an unreadable smile before turning back to their quarry and dropping the spell with a quick snap of her fingers. She watched as the man stumbled on quivering legs. “Poor Marquis, issuing challenges and hurling insults like some Ferelden doglord. And all dressed up in your Aunt Solange’s doublet. Didn’t she give you that to wear to the grand tourney? To think all the brave chevaliers who will be competing left for Markham this morning, and you’re still here. Were you hoping to sate your damaged pride by defeating the Herald of Andraste in a public duel? Or did you think her blade could put an end to the misery of your failure? Run along my dear - do give my regards to your aunt!”

Asha blinked, having understood only about half of the words that had come out of Madame de Fer’s mouth and gotten a little stuck at around ‘doublet’. The elaborate and many-claused insult seemed to have been incredibly effective however, because the Marquis stumbled away and fled the room. There was a short beat of silence, and then their growing audience turned back to their conversations as if the altercation had been a pleasing, fleeting diversion (and perhaps by Orlesian standards, it was). Vivienne turned back to her with another knife-bright smile, lifting her hands to adjust her horned mask slightly on her face.

“My dear, welcome,” she said, genuine warmth in her voice, “I’m delighted you could attend this little gathering. I’ve so wanted to meet you.”

Asha couldn’t help but smile widely back, and worried that it might have come out a little too goofy for Orlesian tastes. She couldn’t believe a mage had caused such an unapologetic scene, and no one seemed to care or give them a second glance. Was Madame de Fer truly such a powerful figure in Orlais, despite her magic? Asha was slightly giddy with barely repressed excitement as she followed the older woman up the stairs and through the crowded ballroom.

“Will that man cause any trouble?” she asked, in a worried near whisper.

Vivienne waved a dismissive hand, “his aunt is the Vicomtesse of Mont-de-Glace. Not a powerful family but well-respected, and very devout. Alphonse will be disowned for this.”

“But - I mean - you won’t get in trouble, will you? For doing that to him?”

“Goodness, my dear,” Vivienne laughed, clear as a bell, “a man has the impudence to insult someone in my house - why should I be the one to fear retribution? After that well-deserved bout of public humiliation, I imagine we’ll never see him again. He’ll run off to the Dales to join the war effort - either to make a good end or to win back a modicum of self respect.”

“Yes, but-” _You just used magic on him with no real justification_.

“Do hurry along dear - while I have looked forward to our private audience, it cannot take all night.”

Asha followed obediently until she found herself in an empty, darkened corridor, extending to an unused balcony. The activity of the ballroom was now a distant murmur. Madame de Fer spun round to her, the moonlight glinting off the silver embroidery of her outfit and the polished metal of her mask. She extended her hand, “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Vivienne, First Enchanter of Montsimmard, and Enchantress of the Imperial Court.”

“I’m Ashatarsylnin Lavellan. Well, Asha. No impressive titles for me, I’m afraid.”

The woman raised an eyebrow - or at least, Asha thought she did, behind the mask. “You don’t even lay claim to ‘Herald of Andraste’?”

“Um, well, not among friends?” Asha squeaked awkwardly, remembering too late that she was supposed to be giving a salespitch that stressed her own divinity. She hurriedly took the woman’s hand and bowed over it, mostly because she realised with terror that she didn’t know how to curtsy properly. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lady Vivienne.”

“My, aren’t you charming!” Vivienne said with mild amusement. “It is I who am glad to finally be acquainted with you, my dear.”

“Yes, um, _why_ exactly was I invited here?” Asha asked, as politely as she could. “After my rather public denouncement by the chantry a few days ago, my companions and I were surprised that you even requested my company.”

Vivienne made a derisive noise. “With Divine Justinia dead, the chantry is in shambles. Only the Inquisition seems to be showing any urge to restore sanity and order to our frightened people.”

“Oh?” Asha couldn’t really find anything intelligent to say. It seemed like the salespitch wasn’t going to be necessary. Perhaps Lady Vivienne had already received some kind pamphlet from one of Leliana’s ravens. She sounded more confident and certain than Asha had the countless times she’d parroted the same phrases.

“When the two most competent of Divine Justinia’s advisers break away and form their own institution, one can’t help but question whether the chantry is worth anything without them,” Vivienne said, with a cock of her head and a dismissive hand gesture, “while the reverend mothers squabble amongst themselves and bray at rebel templars, you and yours have been actioning real change, my dear.”

Asha could feel her smile widening. Finally, another mage to add to the party, one who wouldn’t cower in corners when the residents of Haven complained or accosted them! Not that Solas was exactly passive, to be fair, it was more that he didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of him...

“As the leader of the loyal mages of Thedas, I feel it only right that I lend my assistance to your cause.”

Asha’s smile slid off her face. “Loyal mages," she tested out the phrase on her tongue, a little confused. "Loyal to who?"

“Goodness, dear, your face,” Vivienne crowed, delighted, “You truly have been out of the world, then? I suppose the Dalish were always wilfully ignorant of the workings of civilised magic, even before your unfortunate... incident. We’re loyal to the people of Thedas, of course. I lead those who have not forgotten the commandment, as some have, that magic exists to serve man.”

Asha’s stomach clenched, her skin becoming colder by degrees. “What?”

Vivienne continued as if uninterrupted, “And as such, I support any effort to restore the rightful order. Such is the wonderful work your organisation has performed.”

“I’m confused. Does this mean…you're loyal, in contrast to the Rebels in Redcliffe? That you’re in favour of the Circles?”

“What did you think ‘First Enchanter’ meant, my dear? I’m one of the few who can still truly claim such a title, with times such as they are.”

“But… but… that’s not what we’re doing,” Asha said through numb lips, “we’re just trying to close the Breach.”

“And I’m sure once you’ve solved that problem, you’ll turn your attention to other wrongs and imbalances with the same commendable efficiency. I look forward to helping you in _all_ of your endeavours.”

“But.” _That’s not a wrong I want to right, and I’m not even sure it’s a wrong to begin with_. “I wasn’t raised in a Circle, Madame de Fer.”

“Yes, and where did that get you, my dear?” Vivienne gave her a thoroughly pitying look, and it fizzled out whatever beginnings of kinship Asha had started to feel for the woman. “I’ve heard your tale. You were unprepared for the attack which took your people, and while what was done to you was truly awful, it wouldn’t have happened if you were a Circle mage.”

“If I’d been a Circle mage,” Asha said, her voice brimming with indignant fury. “It might have happened _sooner_.”

“If the clans had acquiesced to bringing their mages into the Circle, Lavellan might not even have been attacked by templars. I can’t imagine they would’ve felt half as threatened by the presence of your clan's camp.”

Asha froze, feeling like she’d punched in the stomach. 

“Oh dear, don’t buy into the propaganda,” Vivienne said dismissively, completely misinterpreting the horror on her face, “the Circles are not the stuff of horror stories. Where else can mages safely learn to master their talents? We need an institution to protect and nurture magic. As you perhaps know better than anyone, magic will find neither on it’s own.”

_But I was safe until the Circle and its business found me…_

Asha didn’t say that. Instead she stuttered, “But, but - you - with the Marquis -”

Vivienne speared her with a knowing look. “Did you think because I taught a fool some much needed manners, I was about to lead the cry for revolution? Were you hoping for a comrade in arms?” she tutted. “If you’re impressed by my parlour tricks, my dear, you would do well to remind yourself that the social status that the Circle gave me is what allows me to perform them. Are Circle mages not allowed to have a sense of humour? Or a backbone? Must we all skulk in shadows like cowed dogs, bemoaning our plight?”

“But… how was that ‘magic serving man’?”

Vivienne’s mouth twisted in a smirk. “It certainly served you and I well, wouldn’t you agree?”

 _She doesn’t object to the system because she knows how to play it to her advantage,_ Asha realised. _She doesn’t care who else it crushes underfoot._

_Seriously,_ fuck _Orlais._

“You should really rethink your stance of Heraldry, my dear,” Vivienne continued airily, looking her up and down while Asha herself stewed in shocked offence, “eccentricity is only becoming when it’s the symptom of some higher calling. With your background and your current situation, we could really make something of you, even in spite of all your lost time. It’s such a compelling narrative, if we spin it correctly. Just the right amount of tragedy and overcome hardship. I can definitely be of assistance to you in that endeavour.”

_And suddenly I want to take a long, long bath and see if I can wash myself clean of this entire conversation._ Asha thought. Another flash to the words 'they wouldn’t have felt half as threatened…' and she started to wonder what Josephine’s official etiquette opinions would be on either punching or vomiting on the First Enchanter of Montsimmart. Probably not positive. “I’m good, thank you, Lady Vivienne,” she replied, shortly. “But I was sent here to assess your worth to my organisation, not to myself. What else can you bring to the Inquisition’s efforts against the Breach?” 

Vivienne’s look also chilled by degrees, clearly unimpressed. “I am well versed in the politics of the Orlesian Empire. I know every member of the Imperial Court personally. I have all the resources remaining to the Circle at my disposal. And I’m a mage of no small talent. Tell me dear, will that do?” 

The patronising look in the woman's eyes made Asha wonder if perhaps news of her own stuttering attempts at relearning magic may have somehow reached the First Enchanter. It was then that Asha realised she was going to have to hire her, regardless of how much she wanted never to see the woman again. Josephine would never forgive her for losing such a key contact, and Leliana would possibly murder her in her sleep just for upsetting the Ambassador, if nothing else. 

“That will do, Madame de Fer.” she said, the words tasting bitter on her tongue and definitely coming out less than hospitable. "Welcome to the Inquisition." 

__

“Well done, my dear. I knew you’d make the right decision.” Vivienne said, like she was a dog who'd just performed a new, exciting trick. She gave her a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, “do send me your measurements, won’t you? We’ll need to get you a proper wardrobe if you are going to have any hope of being seen in court again.” 

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I, as a player, love Vivienne and completely adore her voice actor, but for all her awesomeness she is 100% the mage equivalent of a Tory.
> 
> Again, poor mage main characters!! You meet this absolute badass and then she's like "lol I don't live in the Circles and live in relative freedom, but obviously you want the Circles back, right? I'll disapprove if you say anything but yes."
> 
> A lot of new characters are getting introductions in these next few chapters. I was like 'only focus on the ones relevant to your plot'. Does that mean, 'everyone but Blackwall'? ...Maybe so.


	18. Chapter Eighteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha still hates Orlais.

“Why are we still here?” Asha groaned, shifting the body of an unconscious Orlesian mercenary out of the way so that she could more easily access the large doors of the estate he’d slumped against when she’d hit him with enough electricity to stun, “who even _is this person?_ ”

She’d been all set to get hundreds of miles away from Val Royeaux - even slightly _excited_ at the prospect of returning to Haven if it meant no longer dealing with racists and snobs. But then someone had tried to spear her in the shoulder with an arrow in the square where she’d been buying pastries. The _only_ consolation for living in Orlais, she felt, was their pastries. Particularly the custard filled ones with cinnamon.

The message that her assailant had attached to their projectile, and the wild goose chase that had ensued involving red handkerchiefs and a few pointed looks by cafe patrons, had lead to the Inquisition extending their stay in the capital by another day, one day more than Asha liked. The delay wasn’t even long enough to justify sending Lady Vivienne ahead of them to Haven, so she was still going to have to endure the woman’s company on their journey back to Ferelden. Luckily, the First Enchanter was so concerned with organising her trousseau that she’d foregone joining them on their mission this evening. Although, really, at this moment in time the word ‘mission’ was feeling a little generous. It felt more like she was working out her frustrations with the Orlesian elite by zapping the incompetent people who’d simply had the stupidity to be hired by them.

“We should take threats to your honour and your life seriously,” Cass grumbled, from where she held the mercenary’s legs. Together they dumped him unceremoniously off the ledge and down into the courtyard below. Asha considered it strength training, though in all honesty Cassandra was probably taking most of the weight.

“Pretty sure half of Val Royeaux wants to kill me at this point.”

“Yeah Flash, but with this one there’s _evidence_.”

The door now free, Asha walked over to it and tested the handle. Creators help her, the damn thing wasn’t even locked. “This is such a waste of time,” she whispered, impeaching some unseen force that resided in the night sky, and then with a deep breath, she swung the door open.

And ducked quickly as a flare of flashfire wildly barrelled past her head in a wide arc that would have missed her even if she’d been unprepared, hitting and fizzling out on the stone behind her. She quickly muttered a barrier spell, but it seemed like even that was a waste because when she looked towards her assailant he simply stood there, in full view without cover, arms theatrically outstretched like he was acting out ‘target’ in a game of charades. “Herald of Andraste! How much energy did you expend to discover me? It must have weakened the Inquisition immeasurably!”

“I don’t know who you are.” Asha said through gritted teeth as she walked into the courtyard. “I’m not sure I actually care.” 

Was it her, or did Orlesians all look the same? Must be the masks. And the general lacy-ness.

The man scoffed, “You don’t fool me! I’m too important for this to be an accident. My efforts will survive in victories against you elsewhere.”

“Good for you, I guess?” Asha replied, tiredly. She really didn’t want to have to kill this one, but when had Orlais ever given her what she wanted?

“Just say what!”

The unexpected voice came from far off to the left. Asha and her newly acquired aspiring nemesis both span to see an elven girl with short hair and a bow enter the courtyard, the garishness of her trousers meaning that she could not successfully blend into the shadows. That was all the details Asha was able to make out before the garishly-trousered woman in question loosened an arrow straight at the Orlesian’s throat.

“What is i-" the man’s questions were cut off by the wet sound of his windpipe being severed, and then he crumpled to the ground.

Asha blinked. She was slightly horrified at the sight of such a sudden and casual death, but more just confused by everything that had unfolded in front of her. If the plot had been so easily dismantled, and the perpetrator was now dead... She groaned, “why? Why are we _even_ here?”

She sent a quick prayer up to the Creators that probably included a few more swear words than Mythal might find prudent, and then walked over to where the newcomer was yanking her arrow from the masked man's throat with gruesome vigour.

“Squishy one, but you heard me right?” she said, finally yanking it free and shaking a shiny clump of matter from the tip, “'Just say “what”'. These rich tits always try for more than they deserve. Blah, blah, blah. Obey me! Arrow in my face!”

“Or throat.”

“Or throat,” the girl acquiesced with a shrug, “So - you followed the notes well enough.”

“Those were your notes?” Asha blinked, then said, “ _did you shoot at me?_ ”

“Missed, didn’t I? Don’t do that often. Glad to see you’re…” the girl wiped her arrow on her trouser leg and then replaced it in her quiver, turning to look at Asha fully, “Annd... you’re an elf.”

“Excuse me? So are you.” Asha pointed back at Solas, “so is he.”

“Oh well, that’s fine I guess. Hope you’re not ‘too elfy’.” the girl gave her a hard look, and then sighed, “you’re gonna be ‘too elfy’, aren’t you?”

“What gave it away?” Asha said dryly, with a slightly unwilling smile, “the ears, or the” she gestured at the vallaslin on her face with a flourish, “general tree motif?”

The other elf grinned unrepentantly, the sarcasm glancing off her as she gave another shrug. “I mean, it’s all good innit? The important thing is, you glow. You’re the herald thingy?”

“I mean, that’s as good a title as any. I tend to prefer Asha, all the same,” Asha looked down at the man and the pool of blood gradually spreading from his cooling corpse. When had such a thing become routine, exactly? “Who was this guy?”

“No idea. I don’t know this idiot from manners,” the elf said, seemingly unconcerned by that fact. “My people just said the Inquisition should look at him.”

“Your people?... I’m guessing you don’t mean elves?”

“Nah! I mean people people. Name’s Sera. This is cover. Get around it.”

“Um… why?” 

“For the reinforcements.”

“There’s reinforcements?” Asha couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice as she followed Sera’s lead and tucked herself behind a wall, gesturing for the rest of the party to do the same. She glanced over at the other girl from where she was crouched behind one of the low walls encircling the courtyard. “Seems mightily competent of them, really.”

“Don’t worry. Someone tipped me their equipment shed. They’ve got no breeches.”

Asha was surprised by the laugh that sprung up within her at that, clamping both hands over her mouth to stifle it as she heard the movement of oncoming troops. Not that they needed much to preserve their advantage or the element of surprise - it seemed that Sera had indeed removed half the poor mercenaries' clothing, and both parties were very confused by this fact when they all stumbled through into the courtyard in such a state of obvious disarray. Solas cast a questioning glance at Asha, who gave him an equally bemused shrug before sending a flurry of energy at the nearest bottomless merc. She wasn’t about to look a gift - pants-thief? - in the mouth. Sera, her nearest comrade in the line of ranged defense, was cackling like a madwoman next to her. It didn’t seem to affect her aim.

“There’s no need to kill them!” Asha hissed at her.

“Them’s your rules,” Sera shot back, as one of her arrows embedded itself in an enemy’s eye socket. She stuck her tongue out at Asha, only adding to the sheer unreality of the situation. “Got no time for goody-two-shoes.”

“I think this particular conflict can definitely be embellished a little in the tales, Varric!” Asha called across the courtyard as she watched Cassandra tackle a mercenary who, it turned out, had also foregone underwear. The Seeker let out an enraged cry of disgust before re-positioning her shield.

“You’ve never hung out with Hawke!” the dwarf replied with a wicked grin, “been a long while since we’ve caught an enemy with their pants down. Feels just like old times.” 

They made depressingly short work of the mercs, and Asha found herself wondering if Alphonse, nephew of Aunt Solange of the Doublet, would find himself joined by several dozen men trying to reclaim some scrap of dignity on the front lines of the civil war. Maybe she could ask this Gaspard man to name a battalion after her, given that she was sending him so many new recruits?

By the end, nearly two thirds of the breechless mercenary band were unconscious or incapacitated, the other third thoroughly pin-cushioned into the next life. Despite herself and her own reservations at such unnecessary violence, Asha couldn’t help but be impressed by what was a pretty clear demonstration of Sera’s archery skill. She hadn’t been able to get her spells out quick enough to fell the targets the other woman had selected in time to save them, and had finally found herself giving up on a lost cause and just trying to incapacitate the rest before Sera could work her way round to them.

 _I can’t wait till Cass has to write this up in a report._ Asha said with a small grin, looking at how many bare, semi-clad arses glinted in the moonlight as the warrior extricated herself from the fray.

“C’mon, this way,” Sera had waded through the bodies towards the double doors the mercenaries had burst through, and gestured for them all to follow without looking back to see if they actually listened. Again, there was another bemused glance in Asha’s direction, another ‘might as well’ shrug in answer, and they followed the rogue through into the courtyard by the next wing of the house, which led to both the exit and what seemed to be the barracks where the guards were housed, both doors burst open and spilling buttery firelight onto two trees silhouetted in the darkness. At first, Asha thought they were some kind of willow, but then her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she saw that each of the twenty or so men’s sets of breeches had been chucked into the highest limbs and branches of each tree.

Sera turned round, grinning, gesturing with pride at what she clearly saw as a work of art. “Friends really came through with that tip. No breeches!"

“And you didn’t think of perhaps… relieving them of their weapons?” Cassandra asked in a tired voice. 

“Pffft! That’s no fun!”

Cassandra cast Asha a pointed look, as if to say ‘now you have to talk with her’. Asha sighed, “well, thank you, Sera, for your… help? I’m not really sure how we can repay you. I’m still not even sure why we’re here.”

“Didn’t do it for you. Well, I did, but not the way you’re thinking.” Sera rocked back on her heels for a beat, then said “So, Herald of Andraste. You’re a strange one. I’d like to join.”

“I- I’m sorry?”

“The Inquisition. Me and my friends, we’ve seen what you’ve been doing. They say the Hinterlands was a right clusterfuck before you came, you with your fancy hand. We want to get involved before it becomes a bit too… order-y. You know, less ‘let’s stop everyone from dying horribly’ and more ‘let’s stop everyone from ever questioning us, ever’.”

“I mean, the ‘not dying’ is still the aim, as far as I’m concerned.” _And then getting far, far away from here._ Asha thought to herself.

“That’s what they all say though, in the beginning, innit? Next thing you know you’re sitting on enough loot to feed a kingdom, but you don’t want to. Me and my friends, we can keep you grounded. On the straight and narrow.”

“I’m sorry, but all I know so far about your group is that I was almost shot, then followed a random trail into a trap I could’ve easily avoided by just getting the fuck out of Orlais and going home. I am feeling _far_ from grounded.”

“What trap?” Sera said with a shrug, “you knocked, he crapped. Better to take him out now than six months down the line when all that shit he was spouting actually means something. It’s... look, it’s like this: I sent you a note to look for hidden stuff by my friends. The Friends of Red Jenny. That’s me.”

“But… you just said your name was Sera.”

“Nah! Don’t you get it?” Sera groaned when Asha just blinked at her, “Well I’m just _one_. So is a fence in Montford, some woman in Kirkwall. There were three in Starkhaven, brothers or something. It’s just a name, yeah? It let’s little people, ‘friends’, be a part of something while they stick it to nobles they hate.”

Asha let her glance wander to the tree of breeches outside what she could only assume was this very rich man’s house.

“So here in your face, I’m Sera.” Sera waved to demonstrate, “‘The Friends of Red Jenny’ are sort of out there. I use them to help you. Plus arrows.”

“Plus arrows?”

“Yeah.” Sera pantomimed being shot in the face, as if they had not just witnessed such a thing scant moments before.

Asha frowned, “If you just want to piss off nobles, why would you want to help the Inquisition? We’re pretty much _drowning_ in nobles.”

Behind her, Cassandra coughed pointedly. Asha reflected again that she probably needed to work on her Inquisition salespitch. And probably not insult her friends.

“But _you’re_ not, yeah? Not one of them, I mean. Not sure about all your handwave-y mage stuff, but what I do know is you don’t buy into all that, at least that’s what all my friends tell me. At least not yet. Would rather have some more people reminding you where you came from.”

“What, from the elves?” Asha pitched her voice as teasing, and said with a wink, “ _Shathe Shiralen!_ ”

“Ewwww, no!” Sera made a face, “Look, from what I heard, you’re one of us. Not all that knife ear shit. The _other stuff_. You got stomped on by someone big.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what the Friends of Red Jenny is. Someone little always hates someone big,” Sera sighed, “I heard that Kirkwall was a right shit fest, and you got caught in poo bucket crossfire. You were little, you had no power, and you got right fucked over and, afterward, no one cared. But _we do_. Unless they don’t eat, sleep, or piss, no one is ever far from someone little. And we make sure they know it.”

“So all those notes…” Asha thought back to the half-broken sentences Cass had read aloud. Desperate people watching from the sidelines, conspiring to take someone down.

“Doesn’t always work out, but a lot of people hated this guy. Someone got a laugh, someone got even, someone got paid. And someone has to have explained to them that free help is good.”

“You really want to help the Inquisition?” Asha couldn’t help sounding incredulous.

“Don’t matter what I think about your airy-fairy principles. S’not about that,” Sera scoffed, “there’s a _hole_. In the _sky_. You lot are the only ones doing shit all about it, so I want to help. Religious twits will say a lot of stuff to freak people into emptying their pockets, but I guess they weren’t lying. You’re lit up all over the shop,” Sera glared, “Look don’t get ahead, yeah? I want to help this, whatever it is, Inquisition.”

“I mean,” Asha cast her eyes round the group for their opinions, “you’re clearly capable. In a way...” _And,_ she thought, _if I had to let Vivienne in…_ Maybe Sera would offer a useful counterpoint to the snooty, aloof mage. If Asha’s outfit had been deemed an eccentricity, she was pretty sure that in Madame de Fer’s eyes Sera’s trousers would end up with her incarcerated.

“You killed this man with little or no provocation, and we still don’t even know his name,” Cassandra said in a severe tone. 

Sera shrugged, “what, like you’ve never offed someone? Bad things should happen to bad people. We find someone not so bad, maybe he’ll end up not so dead. Good enough?”

“I think we need a little more than that,” Solas said, clearly unimpressed.

“No, it’s ok,” Asha said. Solas gave her a surprised look, but she couldn’t help but think that it would be the utmost hypocrisy to stand and look on as people told Sera to rein in her murderous impulses, when she was currently her own mess of bloodlust and emotion. She simply gave him an apologetic shrug, “we’ll mostly be fighting demons anyway.”

“...if you’re sure,” Cassandra said, sounding anything but herself.

“Look,” Asha turned to Sera, “I’m vouching for you on one condition. No more barrelling headfirst into traps blindly - you want something from us, you keep us in the loop rather than getting us to dance to your tune. I don’t like being fucked about.”

Sera pulled a face, a half intrigued leer, “ooo, someone wears the britches round here. I can deal with that. You gotta promise you’ll always hear me out though.”

“I don’t - That’s - I’m not the leader!” Asha huffed, pushing her hair out of her face, “I’ll make sure that the Inquisition will always hear what you have to say. So long as you bring good intel and don’t... well… don’t make me come to Orlais too often. You can join.”

“Yes!” Sera whooped, “Get in good before you’re too big to like. Good shout, your Herald-iness.”

“Not the Herald,” Asha held out her hand, “Asha.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t think she should come.”

It was the next morning, and Asha was saddling Buttons early, eager to get the fuck out of Val Royeaux. Both she and Cass, freshly bathed and damp haired after a bitch of a training session, were counting out the provisions, making sure they had enough now that they had another traveller coming along for the ride. Asha didn’t want to have to go out and get more supplies from the city at Knife Ear Rates.

“I agree with Cassandra, she’s a rogue element,” Solas said from the mouth of the stables, entering with his own packs. Asha found it telling that he’d either been eavesdropping and waiting for an opening, or that he automatically knew who ‘she’ referred to. 

“Ha! _Rogue_ element.”

But her weak joke did nothing to alleviate Solas’ serious expression. “Her actions last night were erratic and uncontrolled. They led to needless risk and needless violence.”

Asha could hear the unspoken words from both of them: _she could be a bad influence... on you_. She glanced at Solas and saw the apologetic edge to his gaze. The problem with asking someone for help was it meant they knew your weaknesses, and once they did, you had to trust them not to make you feel small about it. They really, honestly didn’t think that one trigger happy thief would lead her down a path of wanton destruction, did they?

“Look,” she said, turning to them both, “we’re not really in the position of picking and choosing our allies. Sera offers up resources you know both Josephine and Leliana could make use of.”

“I didn’t like the way she acted. It was volatile and immature. We can’t trust her.”

“Cass, no offence, but you let me get up close and personal to the Breach when I was a literal _prisoner_ , and the person who you thought caused it in the first place,” Asha sighed, “I fucked up on that first day. A _lot_. I got better. Sera deserves the same chance I got to prove herself and help the Inquisition. Creators know she seems more willing than I was, in the beginning.”

“In the beginning?” Cassandra said with a keen look. "Not now?"

“Yes, in the beginning,” Asha said, trying not to blush or fidget at the admission that maybe she didn’t hate every moment of a job she admittedly spent a lot of her time complaining about. “She fucks up, acts weird, let Leliana take care of it. As it is, she offers numbers, which we don’t have. And she’s pretty handy with a bow. What if Varric... sprains his wrist or something? She could be useful - agreed?”

Solas and Cassandra shared a weighted look, before saying, “agreed.”

“Now, can we get the fuck out of here? Orlais, I mean? Not just this stable.”

“Well, if you lot are done being all Deep and Meaningful and _Boring_ ,” came a false mockery of a lofty voice from the entrance as Sera entered, in the same garish clothes but with a leather duster over the top, “don’t see why we can’t be making tracks.”

Asha sighed, “You were there the whole time, weren’t you?”

“Been here since you and Muscles were getting all hot and bothered earlier,” Sera replied unashamedly, waggling her eyebrows with a leery expression, “not my fault neither you or the egg-head noticed me. Maybe you shouldn't go talking about people in the open.”

“Yes, a four horse stable is quite the public thoroughfare. More fool us,” Solas muttered, moving over to his mount and about as far away from the rogue as possible. 

They saddled up and moved out, sending a runner ahead to inform Lady Vivienne that they’d meet her and her much-dreaded procession of possessions and entourage at the northern gate of the city, the same route they’d arrived by a week before. Unexpectedly, Sera had bought her own horse, a pale buckskin pony that was… well, probably stolen. Probably from the man who’s house they’d ransacked last night, judging by the fact that it had the shiny, well-kept look of a thorough-bred.

Sera sidled over to pace with Asha, her mount belligerently following her commands after a few prompts and a muttered curse word. “So, Herald.”

“Asha.”

“Asha,” Sera scratched her nose as they joined the main thoroughfare out of the city. “What’s the elfiest thing you’ve ever done? Other than all the rituals and the praying and the ‘let’s just tattoos over my eyes I’m sure that won’t hurt’ stuff.”

Gods help her, was their new companion trying to make _small talk_? Asha had expected some kind of quizzing in regards to the Inquisition or Sera’s status within the organisation, so she found herself struggling for an answer to an inane question. It was a little too early to try and successfully think of anything that would entertain this strange, surreal new addition to their group.

“You ever ridden one of those horned things naked through a forest under the moonlight or something?”

“Gods no!” Asha replied, horrified, “you do realise that halla have _ticks_?”

“What then?”

It was then - at the thought of nakedness - that the perfect, most entertaining, and utterly true answer popped into Asha’s head. She knew exactly what would make Sera laugh, and also knew she would immediately regret it the moment it left her lips. _Don’t say it don’t say it don’t say it_. It wasn’t worth making the newcomer feel like she’d been bought into the fold.

But she hadn’t had any coffee this morning. Her filter wasn’t working.

“I may have once... played an the role of an Evanuris. In... private.”

She clamped her hands over her mouth, horrified at her own candour. She’d also said that _entirely too loud_. They were _in public_.

“You what?”

“Yeah, Flash, elaborate for us.” came a thoroughly, shit-eating satisfaction-filled voice from behind a little ways behind them. Varric was bringing up the rear of the group, which meant that absolutely everyone in their party had heard.

“...Does that mean what I think it means?” came Cassandra’s mutter from her left, confirming her horrified suspicions. That was when Sera started cackling.

“Well,” she started babbling, before - gods help her - Solas could speak on how ‘elfy’ this was, compared to his own relative scale. She couldn’t take it back now, so might as well commit and own it proudly, although she was keenly aware that her face was already turning beetroot. “Let’s just say, that one person that I… well _knew intimately_... he really, _really_ liked that I could speak fluent 'elvhen'. You could say it was an... unseen perk of being the First."

“The Evanuris are your gods, right? I remember Daisy talking about them. Sounds kinky.”

“Sounds like _blasphemy_ ,” said Cassandra, scandalised.

“Look, ok! It’s a really pretty language, and he was a city boy, he couldn’t speak it that well, so it didn’t even have to be sexy half the time, _or_ divine, either. It could just be a shopping list said in the right way.” She switched to elvish and pitched her voice to demonstrate the tone of benediction, desperately trying to think of things that were vaguely innocuous, “ _cinnamon, candlewax, silk sheets, potato..._ ”

She heard Solas fall into a half-coughing, half-laughing fit. Thank the gods, hopefully now he’d just find it a funny joke instead of a thoroughly mortifying insight into her hot mess of a personal life.

“You just asked me what the 'most Dalish thing' I’ve ever done is, and honestly, if you’re discounting everything I did as the First in my clan then I would say, that- that-”

“Kinky elven god roleplay.” Varric supplied.

“-talking sexy elvish in certain situations, in a certain persona, is probably something that would almost definitely count. And it was just over a couple of restocking trips we made to his village in winter, we weren’t even seeing each other for that long anyway.”

“You know,” Varric observed, “if you led with that, maybe more of your people would join the Dalish."

“That can’t be a thing,” Sera said, with tears in her eyes, “which are even the sexy ones? They’re all crusty and _old_.”

“Well, you see,” Asha tried to sound sage, arranging herself primly on her mount, “if you were ‘elfy’ enough, you’d know which ones are the sexy ones. That is the secret wisdom that comes with the ages.” She waited a beat, before attempting a further joke to retrieve some semblance of composure, “I bet Solas knows…”

“I have some inkling,” came the dry, amused voice from behind her on her right, and that made things worse because now she was wondering if he was making guesses at exactly what her sex life had involved. She was really, really glad no one could see her face except Sera, who already looked ready to wet herself.

“Wait a second-” said Cassandra.

“ _Can we please forget I said anything?_ ” Asha interjected shrilly.

“No,” Cassandra replied, “I mean - I’m not talking about... about that, but stop a second. Do you recognise her…?”

The Seeker trailed off as all five of them pulled their mounts to a stop. At the side of the path, just before the northern gate, stood a pale elven woman in royal blue robes, with cropped black hair and sharp features. Asha didn’t recognise her, but even she could tell that the woman marked their progress, her eyes following them closely as they stopped moving. At the first acknowledgement, that brush of eye contact as their horses fully stilled, she began to walk towards them.

“That can’t be… it is! That’s Grand Enchanter Fiona!” came Cassandra’s hushed and harried near whisper.

“Wasn’t she at the Conclave?” asked Asha, though she herself couldn’t remember her.

“Do you think she heard about Flash’s penchant for-”

“Be quiet, Varric!” Cass hissed.

And, well, that was how Asha first met the Grand Enchanter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha, I lowkey forgot I wrote this in my initial draft! I hope people don't mind a little silliness to break up these quite plot-heavy chapters, I was mostly just trying to make this 'let's get the gang together' routine a little more interesting, with some more... original content. 
> 
> At least I, personally, can enjoy it in the knowledge that it is 100% in character, for Asha.


	19. Chapter Nineteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha makes friends with Sera, and decides to forgive a templar.

It was a damp and foggy day when they returned to Haven, Vivienne turning her nose up at the depressing Ferelden climate as the fine mist of rain finally began to seep under their layers of clothes.

“I understand the precedent for locating the Inquisition here initially, given the Conclave,” the First Enchanter noted, “but why you still insist on making this backwater your base of operations is beyond me.”

“Um… the Breach is right there?” Asha said, indicating the swirling bruise colour in the sky.

“Oh, well, that explains the smell,” she sniffed. “Sulfur.”

Asha rolled her eyes, and a quick glance to her left showed her that Sera was making the same expression, only with a little more mimed gagging once she caught Asha’s grin. It had quickly become apparent that the only thing Asha needed to make Lady Vivienne’s company bearable was to also have Sera there to weather it with her. As the closest thing within range to one of those nobles that Sera regularly liked to fuck over - it seemed that Cassandra was too ‘thuggish’ to count - Vivienne had become the prime target of ridicule. She’d certainly not helped matters by continuing to maintain the general air of condescension that seemed to clothe her like armour.

In comparison, Asha _really liked_ Sera. She couldn’t really remember making the decision to do so, but somehow they’d become friends without ever discussing the fact. On their fourth night on the road, Sera had pilfered a bottle of brandy from somewhere - Asha suspected it might have been from one of Madame de Fer’s many items of luggage - and the two of them had gotten incredibly drunk, mimicking the Enchanter’s accent in the most nasal manner possible. Had Vivienne walked in then, Asha would probably have been mortified, but instead the Enchanter had actually stumbled across their clearing about an hour later when they’d both been feeling up their own tits, giggling as they lamented the general lack of elvish bustiness in both themselves and former paramours. Asha couldn’t quite remember how the conversation had come about. Possibly from the fact that Sera’s armour seemed designed to somehow… accentuate her own assets.

Vivienne had taken in the two of them, hands crossed on their chests and doubled over with laughter, and given them such a look. Asha thought it was supposed to make her feel repentant, but when she was half a bottle of brandy in it had just made her laugh harder.

“If I might be so bold, Asha dear, is _this_ the company you would present as the Inquisition?”

“Who came with a spy network, Vivvy, was it you?” Sera had sneered. “Oh no, wait a minute, you just bought twenty nonces in dumb hats and dressing gowns.”

“What is it that you would like to say, Madame de Fer?” Asha had tried to pitch her voice as formal, but she was far too drunk to succeed, “we were just having fun, before you arrived.”

 _“_ You don’t want people thinking you’ve made an,” Vivienne sniffed, taking in Sera’s haircut and her outfit, “unsavoury connection. One must pick one’s peers and also… one’s associates.” Vivienne cast a pointed glance at their hands, “You don’t know where she’s been.”

Asha had found that even more hilarious. What did Madame de Fer think sex between two girls looked like, exactly? It wasn’t like they’d been feeling _each other_ up. Although it only took thirty seconds in Sera’s company to deduce the fact that she liked women, it was also pretty clear that elves, particularly ‘elfy’ elves, were not really her type.

From then onwards, Sera had made a point of watching Asha and Cassandra train every morning before they set off on their journey. Her spectatorship came complete with a ribald commentary on aspects of their form belted at the top of her lungs, that made Cass blush and Asha snigger. The rogue raised her voice to an even louder pitch every time Vivienne walked past.

Asha shouldn’t have found it so amusing. Maybe she really was a bad person.

She knew that some of the others were finding it a little hard work, the new chaotic element thrown into their small unit which had just been beginning to gel together. Even she couldn’t always hide the slight spikes of hurt that might come from one too many pointed comments on her Dalish heritage. But the truth was, Sera had immediately done away with any formalities - it was possibly generous to imply she ever observed them in the first place - and was treating Asha exactly the way she wanted to be treated: like anyone else. Yeah, at times it was annoying, but it was also refreshing. Everyone else was too scared of her leaving, or running away, or blowing up catastrophically to annoy her. Well. Except Vivienne. Who was just… existing, and that was enough to be a source of frustration. Her only topics of conversation seemed to be fashion, the nobility, or how much the mages had 'lost their way'.

Now that they were back in Haven, Asha couldn’t help but feel a little optimistic, despite herself. Although the trip to Val Royeaux had felt thoroughly pointless when she was chafing against the confines of the city, she now saw it with hindsight as some kind of turning point. Surely, now that the templars had declared their independence and even beaten down a chantry mother, everyone in the Inquisition would have to admit they weren’t trustworthy enough to form an alliance. She’d be absolved of any responsibility in that quarter. And her actions had successfully earned the attention of the Rebel Mages, so she’d achieved the task that the Inquisition’s leadership had asked of her. Not only that, but she’d recruited two new, powerful allies, each with their own networks of competent allies that would bolster the organisation’s slim numbers. Maybe that would mean that they would be less reliant on her as the Herald, and she would be able to fade into the background, only required to wave the anchor whenever and wherever it was needed.

She dismounted Buttons and handed her reins over to the stablehand, surveying the Haven training ground which seemed, with the rain, to have transformed into ankle deep mud. There were fewer recruits training there now, and those that were so plastered in slime and dirt that it was clear the conditions were making it hard to stay upright. Asha looked down at her own clothes, which were definitely dirty and greying in places from the few days of travel. She picked at a jam stain on her shirt cuff, from her last Orlesian pastry two days ago.

“Should we… bathe before meeting with Leliana?” she asked, casting a dubious glance at Cass.

“Normally I would say yes, but we should introduce our new members now so that we may see them settled as soon as possible,” the Seeker said, coming to stand next to her.

“This the Nightingale, yeah?” Sera asked. “Count me in.”

“Why do you sound so… excited?”

Sera shrugged, “Not everyday you get to meet someone’s whose fucked over your plans quite as much as that one. My friends have had more than a few run-ins with her skulking shadows.”

“Excuse me, um, Lady Herald?” came a male voice, calling from the front gates of Haven.

“I’m not the-” Asha spun round to address them, and then locked up in place. The person, rushing over to meet her, was the templar she’d punched in the throat nearly a fortnight ago.

“Stay back!” Cassandra growled, readying herself in a defensive position one step in front of Asha.

“My apologies, Lady Seeker,” the man said hurriedly, halting in place, holding his hands up in surrender, and pinning his eyes to the dirt at their feet, “I only… that is… I only wanted to speak with the Herald of Andraste, I swear. Look, I’ve not got my weapon.”

“Oh, I recognise you,” came an interested voice from a few feet back Vivienne sidled up to the conversation, having dealt with her own horse. “You were part of Knight Captain Rylen’s troops, weren’t you? Of the Starkhaven Order? You were there when I visited the… rubble… last spring.”

“Not anymore, miss - lady - First Enchanter, I mean. I serve Knight Captain… _Commander_ Cullen now, lady, at least… I did.” the soldier gulped, casting nervous, imploring eyes at Asha, “please, my lady Hearld, if you could just hear me out…”

“You spoke plenty last time,” Cassandra said through gritted teeth, “so much so, I’m not sure what else is left for you to say.”

Asha felt a presence at her side and saw that Solas had come up on her right, leaning against his staff which was placed slightly in front of them both. Sera was also watching the exchange with open, suspicious interest, hand resting innocuously on a flask attached to her belt which Asha knew was full of acid. Something tightened in her chest, but she put up a hand to her friends to signal for them all to stand down.

“What was it that you wanted to say to me?” she said, proud of how cold and even her voice was.

“I… I wanted to apologise, my Lady.”

“Oh?” Asha gave him a genuinely bemused look, “why?”

“I shouldn’t have said what I said, my lady. The Commander, he’s taken me off active duty, says he doesn’t want men serving who don’t believe in the cause,” the man gave a pained expression, “but I do, my lady. I do believe in the cause. I lost good friends at the Temple, and I want to stop the Breach. But the Commander said he won’t let me fight until I apologise, and he gets your permission for me to rejoin.”

Asha smiled bitterly. “So you’re only apologising to appease me? To get what you want.”

“No,” the man looked panicked, “I mean, yes, I want to rejoin and I need you to say I can, but… I am sorry, my lady. I realise now that I shouldn’t have said those things, shouldn’t have questioned, it’s not my place. You closed the Breach, you stopped everything that was happening, and I shouldn’t have been so ungrateful...”

“Sounds like he’ll say anything when you’ve got his bollocks in a vice,” observed Sera from her corner. “I’d recommend twisting.”

“Spoken like the uncivilised idiot you are,” Vivienne sighed.

“I quite disagree, Lady Vivienne,” said Cassandra with a hard smile, “you would probably consider me very civilised, and I too am more than happy to see this man squirm.”

“All I want to do is fight the Breach, Lady Herald,” the man said desperately. “I realise now that I shouldn’t question how you or the Inquisition choose to do it. I know I don’t deserve your kindness, but please...”

Asha sighed tiredly. It wasn’t like he was apologising for his view on mages, or for his own thoughts on her tranquility. Once again, she wasn’t a mage or an elf treated unjustly, she was the Herald. Different and special because she glowed and because they all needed to be in her good graces if they wanted to live. But… she found herself not really wanting to press the issue. Vivienne had made her own views on apostates abundantly clear in the last week of travel, and she was a mage herself. After a week of letting insults slide of her back, Asha was tired. As long as she never had to speak to this man again… well, what was it to her if he threw away his life on a cause?

“I’ll talk to the Commander,” she said with a sigh.

“Thank you, my lady!”

“Don’t thank me yet,” she said sharply, "or ever, in fact."

 _After all,_ she thought, _I’m not doing it to_ help _you._

“Ooh, they're pretty, even with their stupid hats,” Sera said as they walked into the Haven chantry, waving at one of the sisters who gave her a confused look. Only Vivienne and Sera had stayed with Asha and Cassandra, although Solas and Varric had offered to keep them a table at the Singing Maiden that evening, once business was concluded and baths had been taken.

“Asha!” Josephine had been conferring with two women that Asha didn’t recognise, clipboard with fresh candle in hand, and smiled when she saw the four of them approach. “So good to have you safely returned to us. Leliana and Cullen are currently in the War Room, awaiting your arrival. And… a welcome?" she cast a startled glance at the rest of the party, "to your... guests?”

“Lady Montilyet!” Lady Vivienne drawled in delight, “so good to know the Inquisition has some true quality… expertise... in its ranks. Why, it must be almost three years since I saw you last, at that debut in Val Royeux! How is your dear sister?”

“First Enchanter Vivienne? Oh, goodness,” said Josephine with wide eyes, immediately putting her ambassador persona firmly back into place as she ushered them forward, “Yvette is quite well, thank you for asking. If you could… just come this way?”

“We did send reports ahead,” Asha muttered apologetically, coming into step with the ambassador.

“Yes, well, Leliana’s agents already knew about your altercations with the Grand Enchanter and the Lord Seeker,” Josephine said, “but it seemed like she forgot to mention the new additions to your party…”

“Like your shirt,” Sera interjected from Asha’s other side. “Very shiny.”

“Um, well… thank you, Lady…?”

“Just Sera,” she said, giving Josephine a wide grin and a look of unsubtle attraction that, well, Asha certainly couldn’t judge where the Ambassador was concerned.

Josephine opened the door to the war room and ushered everyone inside. Cullen and Leliana looked up from the map table, stacks of reports in hand, taking in Asha, Cass, and their newcomers.

“Welcome back,” blurted the Commander. Asha looked to Cassandra, assuming he directed the greeting to his friend, who nodded back at him.

“Thank you for coming straight to us. We’ve already had word of how things progressed in the capital,” Leliana said, thumbing through the documents she held. “But we’d welcome your take on them, when you’re ready.”

“First things first, Asha wanted to introduce the two people she has newly recruited to the Inquisition,” Cassandra said, returning her friend’s look pointedly, gesturing for her to speak and then glaring at her until she did.

“Yes well, might I introduce First Enchanter Vivienne, of…” Asha wracked her brain, recalling their first meeting and the chain of titles the woman had spat out, “of Montsimmard.”

“Charmed. So good to see you again, Lady Nightingale. And you, Knight Captain, though I only saw you briefly and know you mainly by reputation. First Enchanter Orsino, for all his faults, always spoke very highly of you.”

 _Did he?_ Asha wondered incredulously. She could double check that information with Varric later, given that Orsino was a name she recognised from his stories.

“No need for flattery, your ladyship. It’s just Commander, now,” Cullen replied gruffly.

“Still, it’s good to know, given that the path the Herald seems to be so insistent for us to take with the rebels, that we’ll have templars on hand to-”

“And this is Sera,” Asha said loudly, gesturing to her friend. “She’s one of the Friends of Red Jenny. She helped us with a - well, less of a threat and more of a nuisance - in Val Royeaux, and has offered them up as a network to help us with our cause.”

“Charmed,” said Sera in the fake, mockery of an accent that she’d refined over that bottle of brandy. Asha couldn’t stop the wide grin that split her face, even knowing that it was incredibly unprofessional, with Vivienne right there.

“Yes, well, we need all the help we can get,” Cullen replied awkwardly, studiously avoiding eye contact with Vivienne as if to stop her from talking any further, “welcome, both of you.”

There were a few more exchanged pleasantries, and a good number of namedrops on Vivienne’s part, before they ushered their newly recruited colleagues out of the room. “I’ll see you later, yeah?” Sera asked Asha as she stepped out, “you won’t be being serious and important all day?”

“Not if I can help it,” Asha replied with a wink.

“You did well to recruit them.” Leliana told her once the door was shut once more. “Both are useful allies. The Red Jennies are not particularly extensive, in the grand scheme of things, but because of their… composition, they have eyes in a few places I haven’t managed to reach yet. It was an excellent strategic decision.”

“Oh. Good,” Asha said, growing bashful at the praise and resorting to her stalwart strategy of deflecting with bad humour. “For a moment there I was worried Sera was lying through her teeth.”

“The rest of your progress in Val Royeaux was… good, although it seems to raise more questions than it answers.”

“You already know, then?” Cassandra said, “About the Lord Seeker?”

“My agents reported on his behaviour, and on his movement of all Order resources out of the capital following his speech.”

Cullen sighed, looking down at the table, “It’s a shame the templars have abandoned their senses as well as the capital.”

Asha bit her lip to keep herself from saying anything. It was something she’d gotten a lot of practice in over the last week, having to listen as Cassandra unpicked the decisions of her former boss, and the harsh way he’d spoken to her, and then lamented over the mess it left her with. She personally hadn’t liked what she’d seen in the Lord Seeker’s eyes when he’d looked at any of them. He seemed like a horrible, cruel man, and she struggled to see the honourable leader Cass described. She was honestly finding it hard to imagine him as anything other than the stuff of her nightmares, even if she was forced to acknowledge her obvious bias.

It seemed that this act of extreme self restraint did not go unnoticed, because a tense silence followed in the few seconds after Cullen’s words, like ‘templar’ had the same weight as a dirty word shouted in the middle of a chantry service. They were waiting for her to speak. Not trusting herself, she let the silence draw out as Cullen fidgeted, before Cassandra said with heavy sadness, “Lord Seeker Lucius is not the man I remember.”

“He has taken the order somewhere - but to do what?” asked Leliana, “My reports have been… very odd.”

“We could look into it?” Cullen said, tentatively, “This schism might be good for us - I’m certain not everyone in the Order would support the Lord Seeker.”

“And all those templars in one place...” Asha added, every head turning in surprise when she spoke up, “do you think maybe…” she winced, struggling to find a better set of words, “ _my_ templars might be there?”

“We have no intelligence telling us that any of the Free Marches Order is with him, although I will admit that he seems to be recalling forces from all over Thedas, judging by their numbers. Unfortunately, we don’t really have the resources to infiltrate the Redoubt, which is their closest base of operations. It’s heavily fortified, and none of the agents I had have been able to follow them in. They were all... screened, on their way in.” Leliana said, in a way that implied that probably half her spies had probably been killed.

“But the majority of the Order is there,” she continued. “They’ve locked the doors and shut themselves up for whatever fate the Lord Seeker has planned. I don’t like it, but I’d much rather focus on making sure that Redcliffe is safe for Asha when she meets with the mages.”

Asha watched the Commander receive this news, and was shocked when he didn’t seem to question it, silently keeping his gaze pinned on the map in front of him. Even she was a little bit worried by the templars’ behaviour, and she didn’t really care all that much whether they lived or died. Not wanting to see his pained expression, she turned to Leliana, “You think the invitation to meet with the mages could be some kind of trap?”

“Why did Grand Enchanter Fiona go all the way to Val Royeaux to talk to you, when you were right outside the bolted doors of Redcliffe just weeks ago?” Leliana asked with a shrug, “one reason might be that there is something in Redcliffe that she did not want you to see. I would recommend holding off on that invitation until my agents have checked out the situation.”

As the meeting drew to a close and Leliana and Cullen started to pack up their things, Asha shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. She wanted to speak with the Commander when there were a few less people, but then also needed to make sure someone else remained in the room so she didn’t break her own rules. She didn’t exactly succeed in subtlety: the others all paused in what they were doing, when they saw that Asha had not performed her usual act of simply fleeing as soon as she was dismissed, eager to get away.

“I, um… I need to speak with the Commander,” she said, feeling awkward and uncomfortable.

“I shall stay,” said Cassandra immediately, knowing the topic of the consultation. Asha saw that the Commander blushed at this, and wondered briefly if he was ashamed of the precautions she maintained around him. She supposed it also felt a bit like being chaperoned, which was maybe more than a little embarrassing.

Josephine and Leliana nodded and left without another word, while Cullen just stood there, clearly at a loss of how to proceed and simply waiting for her to speak. Asha sighed, moving close to the door so it was at her back, and finally broke the silence. “I’m here to tell you that I accepted the apology of that soldier who attacked me a few weeks ago,” she said, “or well, actually I haven’t accepted it yet, but I give you permission to let him back into the Inquisition.”

Cullen looked up at her, confused. “Really - so soon? You’ve been back all of five minutes.”

“Yes, well, he was waiting at the gate for me, and I don’t really savour the idea of him following me around begging to reinstate him,” Asha replied.

“Heral- Asha- My lady, those aren’t your two choices,” Cullen stumbled over his words, “harassment of that kind would not be tolerated. If you do not wish him to be a part of the Inquisition, we can get him to leave.”

“I’m not really sure I like it being my decision. I was under the impression you needed the men.”

“It’s not about you, not really,” Cullen sighed, rubbing his temple. “It was a matter of discipline. If we’re going to be allying with the Rebel Mages, I can’t have someone treating them like that, and riling up needless discontent. He needed a change in perspective, and quickly. It's my fault for letting it even get to that point: I initially thought that this case was entirely the product of Chancellor Roderick’s scaremongering. When my man proved me wrong, I acted accordingly.”

Asha bit her lip, as she considered it long and hard. “If... if we let him go, what would happen to him?”

“What do you mean?”

“If we discharged him, he’d leave, right? And where would he go? Home? Or,” she sighed, and shuddered, “or back to the Templar Order, wherever they’re all shut up now?”

Cullen paused, giving the idea the same consideration she had. “...Probably the latter,” he admitted.

“Exactly,” she reached behind her so that she held the door handle - eager to escape this conversation, once she’d said her piece. “I say he needs to leave, he leaves: resenting me, probably resenting mages in general, and returning to the Order with all that hatred in his heart. It’s not a good _strategic_ decision.”

She wondered, briefly, who she was trying to argue with here - the Commander, or herself.

She continued, “He wants to fight, and right now he’d still rather be on our side. So just let him back in, all right? If doing that means… one less hateful templar in the world.”

Cullen winced at her tone, and Asha thought she saw Cass look a little pained too. “If that is what you wish,” he said.

“Yes, that’s what I wish,” Asha said, trying not to feel guilty and feeling mad that she did, just a little, which was fucking absurd. “We don’t have the luxury of turning away allies. But know that if he attacks me again, I will kill him.”

“I understand-” said the Commander, then stopped. She was already out of the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, how we all doing? I have no chapter notes for this instalment, so here's just a periodic reminder that if you're willing to stick with me through all my slowburn bullshit and self-indulgent worldbuilding, I really appreciate having you as company! Working on this fic has definitely been making lockdown a hell of a lot easier for me, but if it happens to brighten anyone else's day, that's pretty awesome.
> 
> Also, I found out recently that 'dressing gown' is a UK English phrase, it basically means a robe! The flannel kind that you can snuggle in until like 4pm while in lockdown.


	20. Chapter Twenty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha practices magic, wrestles with FEELINGS, and avoids Vivienne.

Asha stood in her clearing, feeding more and more mana into the barrier she was trying to build around herself. It felt a little like standing under a waterfall: where magic typically imprinted itself and then faded away as if on the breeze, it was now flowing across her skin in a stream as the ground around her hummed with magical energy. The hairs on her arms stood on end. A lacework pattern circled her, weaving and turning in on itself like a spool of thread rolled across a floor.

Then, she stepped on her own fire mine.

The explosion shook the clearing, and Asha squinted against the bright light as the impact of the mine being triggered threw her back. She landed inelegantly on her ass, but that inevitable bruising was the only pain she felt even as burning cinders brushed against her cheeks. She waited for the smoke to clear before examining herself. Her clothing was fine, if a little ashen. The amplified barrier had protected her from any injuries. She stood up, and the world tilted a little woozily the second her body felt the main drain. Then it settled, and she moved over to stamp on the patches of grass which had caught alight in the aftermath of the blaze.

“That was… impressive,” came a voice from the other side of the clearing. Asha looked up with a smile to see Solas, who’d arrived for their scheduled meditation, watching her with trepidation as he approached.

“That’s one word for it,” she said with a grin, “it’s a bit weird, I know. I remember when Deshanna first made me step on one of her mines. I called her all manner of names and told her to fuck off, that I wasn’t an idiot. She said ‘I hope you can think fast, then’ and then she pushed me onto it.”

“That seems unorthodox.”

“Yeah, I always wondered how they taught that sort of thing in Circles. Anyway, it worked. Sort of. I got the barrier up at least. All my limbs remained intact, as you can see,” she gestured to herself before picking up her water skin and taking a long drink.

“You’ve become quite proficient with your magic,” her friend observed.

Asha shrugged. “Not really,” she said, trying her best not to sound bitter about it, “the barrier was good, but my fire mines used to be stronger than this. I could hold more than one up at a time. I’m having trouble focusing on two things at once. My control is still so fucking sloppy.”

“I feel like you are unnecessarily hard on yourself. You’ve retrained your will to control magic, and even at your weakest you still withstood possession. These steps are not easy, and yet you take them without complaint to reach the goal you have chosen for yourself,” Solas smirked, “Your indomitable focus is an enjoyable side benefit.”

Asha snorted as she moved to sit cross-legged on the grass, which was dry after a few days without rain - and the fire, of course. “'Indomitable focus'? Have you _met_ me? I must be better at pretending to meditate than I ever gave myself credit for.”

“You jest, and yet you work unerringly every day to enforce your will. I have yet to see it dominated,” her friend settled on his usual place next to her, giving her a sideways look as his voice softened, “I imagine the sight would be… fascinating.”

There was something his tone that made Asha blink. And then blink again. She wasn’t sure what to say. Was Solas… _flirting_ with her? She cast another glance his way, but his expression was deceptively neutral as he stared out into the tree line, like nothing unusual had happened. And maybe it hadn’t. Maybe she had imagined it?

When she stared too long, his eyes moved again to her face and she startled at the suddenness of the eye contact, knowing that she was probably going to start blushing. His gaze moved from her eyes to roam over her face. “You have a little…” he pointed to his own cheek, and Asha wiped at her face, finding that it came away with a long streak of ash from the explosion.

They settled into silence then, Solas’ eyes fluttering closed and his breath evening out as he began to fall into a meditative state. Deshanna would’ve loved him, the ease with which he let the whole world fall away, trancing to reach whatever far flung corner of the Fade he spent most his time in. Asha tried to follow suit, fidgeting in place and closing her own eyes, if only so that she wouldn’t be caught staring again. But to her, the silence felt charged. The darkness behind her eyelids simply seemed to invite her mind to begin its anxious spiralling around what had just been said.

Had it been flirting? Did she _want_ it to be flirting?

Asha bit the inside of her cheek. It had now been just over two months since she first woke up, since that frantic first day of racing to close the Breach, and one thing that she had to admit was that, now she was regaining her footing and getting used to being fully in the world again, she was finding herself starting to long for other things. Connections to those around her, that meant something more than just survival.

She felt like she was making friends with people, in her slightly uncomfortable, awkward way. But in her clan she had felt _loved_ \- not in the romantic sense, but with the kind of deep, soul binding connection that came from having grown up in a community who knew everything about you, your every strength and flaw. She hadn’t even been with anyone when the templars attacked - her last relationship with a woman from another clan called Eirdhava had fizzled out when she'd had decided she wanted to wander the world for a while. Asha had found herself not even hurting that much over it, because she’d known deep-down that Eirdhava needed to leave just as much as she herself needed to stay. No matter what pains she’d weathered, she’d always known where she fit, and who she fitted with. Compared to her clan, everyone in the Inquisition, even those who she had begun to care for, were relative strangers.

And Asha had always had a distressing tendency for falling in love a little with everyone, for taking one quirk of personality or one sentence spoken, and building an entire imaginary life out of it in her head. It didn’t even need to be taken seriously, it was almost a fun pastime, a way for whiling away the long hours of the day. The weeks spent daydreaming about Cassandra had certainly made time in the Hinterlands pass quicker, even once it became patently obvious that they’d never extend beyond her imagination. It wasn’t like she pinned her hopes for happiness on every dashing individual that she came across, or had her heart broken every time her fantasies didn’t play out. But now, when she lacked the emotional connections she’d had with Clan Lavellan, she didn’t want to try and substitute them with something else, something desperate, a bid to find an anchor for herself when she still felt like she was drifting loose.

She wasn’t grieving some lost love, some lover felled in the templar attack whose death weighed on her conscience. No, she was grieving the loss of her _entire heart_ , because every single member of Clan Lavellan had held a piece.

But that didn’t change the fact that that empty space in her chest wanted something to latch onto in the hopes of rebuilding itself. Other parts of her body wanted to. She was beginning to feel lonely, at times.

Did she like Solas? She didn’t _dislike_ him. And yeah, he was kind of handsome, and heartbreakingly tall, and she could listen to him talk for _hours_. But she wasn’t sure whether she wanted a relationship, and if she just wanted to sleep with someone to get all these newly rediscovered wants out of her system, it certainly wasn’t going to be her close friend, work colleague, and unofficial counsellor.

She hadn’t even taken Sera up on her offer. When she’d asked the other elf if she wanted to become her official roommate in the little Haven cabin, it had been made quite clear that they didn’t _necessarily_ have to use separate beds - small chests and ‘elfiness’ aside. She’d genuinely considered it for a second, but it seemed her mind had already decided that forming friendships was way more important than getting off, at this moment in time. She’d never been great at the whole friends-with-benefits thing. She either wanted sex with all the feelings, or no feelings at all. No in-between.

_...But did he flirt with me though?!_

Well. The hour of meditation certainly passed, though Asha couldn’t even pretend that her mind was quiet at any point in the process. She wasn’t sure parsing the contents of a single sentence like she was a thirteen year old girl wrestling with her first crush really constituted any kind of mindfulness exercise, and she was internally kicking herself over it when she opened her eyes and had to pretend to be as equally calm and unbothered as him, with probably minimal success.

 _Indomitable focus, my ass_. It had to be flirting, if it was this fucking inaccurate. She was obviously distracted as they packed up their things and made their walk back into Haven.

It was for that reason that she did not notice Lady Vivienne until it was too late.

They were walking up to Solas’ lodgings, up by The Singing Maiden, when she finally noticed the silhouette of Madame de Fer’s horn brimmed hat. Why she insisted on wearing it on her daily constitutionals around Haven, Asha had yet to ask. The woman was walking down the path towards them, and when their eyes both locked at the same time, something like a purpose sparked in the other woman’s gaze. Vivienne began to stride towards her with new confidence

“ _Fenedhis_ ,” Asha said, with sincerity. Even though they had not yet been in the Inquisition a week, the First Enchanter had taken every opportunity to try and regale Asha with her opinions on how the incoming mages joining their ranks should be treated. Asha had tried to explain that she was not part of the Inquisition’s leadership, saying - with some chagrin - that integrating the mages were Cullen’s responsibility, as they constituted part of the armed forces. But it seemed that this ice breaker conversation was in fact part of a larger scheme to try and get her to talk more about her future plans for the Circles. She’d been mostly trying to avoid arguments, because she was worried they would only end with her being an emotional mess over things Vivienne had no right to know about. So she’d been deflecting the other woman’s overtures, with excuses of decreasing quality and corresponding success rates.

Still, it would be a shame to give up now. With no better plan of action, she muttered a quick apology to Solas that she wasn’t sure he even heard, and ducked immediately into the closest hiding place - The Singing Maiden.

Which was… not much of a hiding place. Other than the bar, there was no clear cover, and no back exits. Varric and Sera occupied their usual four-person table in the corner, and Asha ran over, in desperate need of allies. They looked up confusedly at her approach.

“Fuck fuck fuck!” she said, raking her hand through her hair, “Vivienne is trying to talk to me.”

Varric raised an eyebrow, “...and that’s a bad thing, because…?”

“Because she’s a stone cold bitch, Varric, and if I hear one more use of the phrase ‘civilised magics’ I might just take her to the Breach and shove her up into it headfirst,” Asha said in a terse voice, “Do you think I can hide anywhere? Under the table? Behind the bar?”

There was an awkward cough that made her heart sink. It was only then that she noticed that there was in fact a third person seated at their usual table, in the seat she usually took because it was somewhat hidden from view and perfect for avoiding pilgrims. Commander Cullen. She blinked in confusion at him just… being there, and felt a vague sense of mortification. What the fuck was _he_ doing in The Singing Maiden? It was… daytime? Mid-week? In fact, she didn’t think she’d ever seen the man when he wasn’t working - although they weren’t exactly on social terms. But he was sitting in a tavern still in full armour, for gods’ sake. The man clearly had either no desire or knowledge of how to unwind.

“Behind the bar's your best bet, Flash. Flissa’s taking a delivery,” Varric said with a grin, “although I’m not sure what you’re hoping to achieve…” he gestured at the window behind him, and sure enough she glimpsed the horned helmet of Madame de Fer walking past the glass.

“Fuck! By the Creators, how many mages are there in Thedas? How many of them are in the motherfucking rebellion? Why did we end up with this one?!” Asha briefly considered maintaining her dignity in front of the Commander, but honestly she found that, right in that moment, she cared more about escaping Vivienne’s notice. “You didn’t see me!” she hissed, “seriously, Sera! You didn’t!”

“Pretty sure the First Enchanter might’ve though, Flash.”

“I didn’t say it was a good plan! Just cover for me, _please_.”

With a brutal yanking motion, she fade-stepped behind the bar, crouching unceremoniously under the wooden countertop as she rematerialised. She heard a gust of icy Haven air breeze through the tavern and then the clatter of heels - who wore high heels in a military encampment! - on the hard wooden floor just moments later, growing louder as the First Enchanter entered. Asha felt a little foolish crouched in her hiding place, but she could only hope that this kind of petty, childish plan was the sort that Vivienne would assume was beneath both of them. That, combined with what she could only hope was her friends’ stalwart and loyal support, might give her some reprieve. As long as Cullen stayed silent she’d be fine, and hey, maybe he hated talking to mages! Even pro-templar ones!

Sure enough, Asha heard Vivienne walk further into the room. “I was hoping to speak to the Herald,” came her imperious voice, carrying across to Asha’s hiding place, “where is she?”

“Haven’t seen her.” came Varric’s casual response, without a second of hesitation. Creators praise Varric, at least she knew she could rely on him to improvise a believable performance without any questions.

“Probably boinking droopy-ears in the woods, or whatever it is that takes them _hours_ every day.” Sera added flippantly. “Being all elfy. You want to join them, Vivvy?”

Vivienne sniffed, “I saw her with the apostate just moments ago, and then she came in here. Am I to assume, then, that she’s avoiding me?”

“Dunno what you’re talking about.”

“I think we would notice if the Herald of Andraste just _walked in here_ , your ladyship,” said Varric smoothly. Asha was actually pretty damn impressed by the bald-faced, unashamed quality to that particular lie.

“Is this really the kind of behaviour I am to expect from this organisation?” the First Enchanter asked, seemingly projecting her voice to the room. “Am I _really_ required to play hide and seek?”

“Actually, Madame Vivienne…”

Asha’s stomach sank as she heard the Commander’s voice interject. She’d been banking on nothing more than confused silence from him, but now she adjusted her position, waiting for the moment when he called her out of her hiding place. She’d have to pretend like she wasn’t trying to do exactly what the First Enchanter was accusing her of. Maybe she could say she lost some of her coin behind the bar?

“I was hoping to speak to you on the topic of managing the mages amongst our troops,” the Commander continued, his voice almost as smooth and unassuming as Varric’s. Asha heard the scrape of chair legs, presumably as he stood. “I was planning to talk it through with you tomorrow, but now seems as good a time as any, if you are free? Would you care to walk with me?”

“I really was hoping to talk with the Herald…”

“I confess, I have also had difficulty getting ahold of her, and the issue is... most pressing. I’ve tried talking to Lady Asha, but as you might well understand, I doubt she is up to this particular task. She hasn’t had any experience of managing a large group of mages, and obviously _you_ are my next port of call. Unless you feel like we have everything in hand…?”

There was a beat of silence. Even after only a bare week of acquaintance, Asha felt like she could picture the struggle Madame de Fer’s face just then - the desire to have her way warring with the desire to give her Very Important Opinions and Expertise on something.

“Well, I certainly noticed some areas for improvement,” she replied, magnanimously, as though she was savouring the words as they left her mouth.

“Excellent! Now, if you could just come with me back to my office -”

Asha listened to the sound of receding heeled footsteps as the Commander, incredibly, convinced Vivienne to leave with him. She stayed under the bar, not quite believing the events that had just played out, until Varric called from his seat, “they’re gone. You can come out now, Flash.”

Wary, and a little shamefaced, Asha peeled herself out of her hiding place, straightening up gingerly. A number of the bar patrons - and she supposed she had just fade-stepped in full view, and a tavern at midday was not _empty_ \- watched as she walked over to her friends and took the vacated chair at their table. The mighty Herald of Andraste, hiding behind a piece of furniture. Maybe this would be the act to finally dispel her divine image.

“Did what I think just happened actually happen?” she asked, slightly dumbfounded.

“You mean, did that idiot just give up his first afternoon off since the damn Breach opened, to save you from the perils of an adult conversation?” Varric replied, then shrugged, “looks like. Didn’t even know he could lie, the slick bastard.”

“Well, it’s not like I _asked_ him to,” Asha retorted, though she sounded guilty even to her own ears.

“Don’t you worry your pretty head about it, Flash,” Varric said gently, patting her hand, “Curly - the Commander - has a bit of a martyr complex. I’m sure this is one of the less dangerous situations in which it’s played out.”

“A martyr complex? But he’s a _templar_.” It was hard to martyr yourself if you were the one holding all the power.

“ _Ex_ -templar, Flash, and you can bet that comes with enough manly brooding angst to rival even the best of them,” Varric gave a wistful look then, “and trust me, I’ve known my fair share of brooders. All he needs is a run-down, dilapidated place to sleep, and he’ll have the image down to a T.”

“Do you think I should… thank him?” Asha grimaced at the thought.

“In the sense of ‘would your half-baked plan of hiding behind an empty bar thirty seconds after being sighted have failed if he hadn’t intervened’? Probably. But in the grand scheme of things… Probably not. You’re both waaay too awkward for that kind of interaction to go well.”

“HEY!” Asha said.

“You’re far too easily offended by that, for someone who just hid to avoid a polite chat.” her friend observed.

“There is _nothing_ polite about Lady Vivienne,” Asha paused for a second to reconsider, “or maybe it’s that everything is polite, even when she’s point blank spitting in my face. Only it’s metaphorical spitting. Fucking Orlesians.”

“So, take it you and droopy-ears have finished boinking, yeah?” Sera looked up from the arrow heads she’d been carving over the course of this entire mess of a conversation, “wanna go shoot some stuff?”

“We’ve not been ‘boinking’, Sera,” Asha said tiredly, though a part of her now wanted to grab her friend by the collar and scream _“why, does it look like that’s what we’re doing? What he wants to do?”_ directly into her face, “we were meditating. We meditate. I’m doing it to try and control my magic.”

“Bleugh,” Sera mimed gagging, “you should tell everyone you’re fucking, otherwise they’ll know you’re _realllly_ boring.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I've added relationship tags! Still going to be a slowburn mess of Austen-ian proportions (most of the romance is properly starting once we reach Skyhold) but I guess we're now getting to the point where there's... actual content, so tags at this point seem like a good idea.
> 
> Friendly, polite reminder - the only one I'll bother giving at any point in this fic - that bisexual people in M/F relationships are still bisexual!! This is coming from a bisexual lady whose preferences tend towards women, so let me have my trash M/F pairings in my fic! I spent a long time thinking about what pairings to put in this, and these ones provide the Most Drama for the story I'm trying to tell xD
> 
> See you for next weeks update! xx


	21. Chapter Twenty-One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha skinny-dips at the Storm Coast, and then embarrasses herself in front of Cullen.

“Krem! Tell the men to finish drinking on the road. The Chargers just got hired!”

“What about the casks, Chief? We just opened them up… with axes!”

“Find some way to seal them!”

“Actually…” Asha looked at the Iron Bull, craning her neck in the hopes of catching his eye, “I wouldn’t mind a cask, or two. If you don’t mind staying another evening, and heading out tomorrow? And... well... company?"

It was her second day on the Storm Coast, and it wouldn’t be lying to say that part of the reason she’d come here was because a pretty boy had told her to. A week ago, Cremisius Aclassi had materialised in front her with his armour and lovely brown eyes, as if in answer to all of her dreams for a meaningless but satisfying tryst. Then he had asked her to come meet his company, and… by the time her brain had done its usual thing of falling splat on the floor and then creeping slowly back into a semi-functional form, she’d decided that. Well. The Inquisition needed more men. People. And she was already bored of waiting around in Haven until Leliana’s agents gave them enough intel for them to finally go to Redcliffe so… why not?

It had taken a couple of days to get sign off from the others in the Inquisition, given that that was the extent of her reasoning on the matter. But it seemed that both Leliana and Josephine knew of Bull’s Chargers as a pretty damn good mercernary company, so they’d ultimately approved her request. She’d left Vivienne in Haven with more than a little satisfaction, and Varric had also declined, saying that he fucking hated the ocean. Sera, Cass, and Solas hadn’t exactly been enthusiastic about it, but… she was the Herald, so they’d agreed to accompany her, lest someone come along and kidnap her, or lop off her arm, or she fell into a ditch or something.

When they arrived a few days later, Asha couldn’t understand why they been so reluctant. Yes, she knew on an incredibly obvious level that they’d had about ten minutes total in the region without rain - and that everything in their tents was doubled wrapped in oiled cloth in the vain attempt to keep it dry. But the landscape was just so… beautiful! After the sedate, rolling hills of the Hinterlands, the harsh, steep rockfaces and dark, emerald green forests on the coastline were dramatic, grand, and awe-inspiring. 

And the sea! Asha’s clan had spent most of her years from fifteen onwards in the Planasene Forest, so she’d seen the Waking Sea from the northern side several times, but that had been from the vantage point of a sheltered bay. Here, on the exposed side, the sea was an entirely different beast, constantly churning and roiling, roaring like a beast as it hit the cliff-faces. On their first day scouting out the region, she’d climbed to the top of one of the crumbling dwarven staircases and looked out onto the slate grey horizon. She tasted salt on the breeze and felt her hair begin to stiffen with it, and knew that this wild, untamed form of nature had the feeling of home. 

“You wanna drink… here?” the Iron Bull cast a meaningful look at her, and then at the iron grey sky above, and then at her again.

“Your men were going to anyway,” she pointed out, “I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun. And if it means free booze, I’m in.”

“Ha! We’re gonna get along just fine,” he said with a wide, appreciative smile. “Men, get the drinks flowing for our fine red-headed friend over here! Seems the hole in the sky can wait, and she’s the expert - we head out in the morning!”

A cheer went up in the group that didn’t quite reach her own party, who cast her some slightly unimpressed looks. She shrugged innocently, “well, it’s not like we were going to get back to Haven in the last few hours of daylight. Do you wanna spend the next twelve hours just crammed in our tents listening to the rain, or would you rather get shitfaced enough to spend it unconscious?”

Cass looked at the sky, frowning, “you make... a valid point.”

Asha, to her mortification, found herself sat next to Krem around the campfire, which meant she had to begin the arduous process of talking to him while pretending she hadn’t fantasised a great deal about him and their inevitable imaginary life together in the week since they'd met for all of fifteen minutes. Instead, she was forced to confront the reality of who she was actually like around him - not very witty, not very suave, and certainly not flirty, because it seemed she only knew how to do that when she scripted it very heavily in daydreams, and Cremisius just wasn’t playing along with what she’d rehearsed in her head. 

In the end, when none of her smalltalk panned out, she settled for talking to Solas and Cass. She asked them teasingly if they could stay on the Coast a few days more, and watched with genuine amusement as they tried to let her down gently, while adamantly rejecting outright any plans that required them to stay a moment longer than necessary.

They drank late into the night, until few were left standing and the casks were fully drained. The Chargers weaved their way back to their makeshift camp, and Cass and Sera also began the short walk back to the Inquisition outpost. Although the campfire hugged the shore, the sea was no longer visible, so the darkness seemed to just... roar around them. Moving just out of the gloaming of the campfire, Asha could see the sky was full of stars, bright and clearer even than they had been even in the Hinterlands. Probably because people still wanted to _live_ in the Hinterlands.

She thought back to the majority of nights she’d spent like this, cold to the bone but just warm enough from the fire to bear it, surrounded by raucous laughter and then left in the solitary quiet of the aftermath.

“Do you wish to return to camp?” Asha startled when she heard Solas’ gentle murmur next to her, having almost forgotten he was there.

“Oh,” she said, “I actually. I wanted to stay longer. Unless... you wanted to go?”

She looked at Solas, whose was trying to keep his disappointment off his face, and whose clothes were damp and soaked through despite the tarp the Chargers had hastily erected above their camp for shelter. She surmised that he had very much _wanted to go_.

“I’ll walk her back,” came the deep bass rumble of the Iron Bull, who Asha thought had been sleeping slumped against one of the empty barrels. He cracked his one eye to watch them, “She’ll be fine, on my honour as a Charger. Takes a lot more to get me drunk than her.”

“I’m not _drunk_ ,” Asha said, pleased by how even and sensible her voice sounded. “I’m just,” she shrugged, looking up at the sky again, “contemplative.”

“How very _Dalish_ of you.” Bull noted, with heavy sarcasm.

“You should go, Solas!” she said with a smile, “I’ll be fine. It’s like, fifty paces up the hill. I’m in capable hands.” And then she waggled the anchor, to make it clear she meant herself and not Bull. “I just like it out here.”

“Your name was chosen well, Ashatarsylnin.” With those soft words and a small smile that she couldn’t quite gauge the meaning of, Solas didn’t push the matter, leaving them by the campfire. Asha watched him until his figure disappeared into the darkness, then with a groan she got up, walked away from the campfire, to the edge of the ocean in the opposite direction. The night was ink black, but the green glow of her anchor allowed her to see when she hit the point where the waves crept up the pebbled shoreline. The sea foam shimmered emerald.

She said she wasn’t drunk, and it was true, but she had just enough alcohol in her system to not feel the cold quite as much as she should, as the wind buffeted around her. She picked up a pebble and threw it, but couldn’t see it hit the water, or even hear the plop it made, over the roar of the waves.

“Saw a dragon fly over here a few days back,” Asha jumped, amazed that she hadn’t heard the Iron Bull approach, given his frankly gigantic size. “Must make its home somewhere round here. Pretty. _Fucking._ Cool.”

Asha looked at him, wondering for a moment if the Benn Hassreth was just gonna shove her under the waves until she drowned or something. She didn’t exactly understand what the Benn Hassreth did other than spying, and she wondered if it was all as very cloak and dagger as Leliana’s brand of spymastry. Camping at the Storm Coast with Leliana would’ve definitely involved a few forcible drownings, or burials at sea. _Eh._ It would’ve been a waste of time to lead her all the way out here just to kill her. They could’ve managed that in Haven.

“I wanna do something really stupid," she blurted out loud. Bull cast a sideways glance down at her, clearly confused.

"I was just gonna do it alone, but seems best to have someone on hand,” she said staring out to the sea, “I want you to help me do it. Will you?" she thought for a second, and then added as an afterthought, "and it's not like a... sexy thing!"

“Depends what it is but… you’re the boss now, I guess.”

“Ok,” she took a deep breath, wishing there was another glass of ale she could drain before she said her plan aloud. “I want you to stand over there,” she pointed back towards the campfire, “back turned to the sea. And then if I like, scream or anything, or the anchor explodes, or if I… oh, if I send up a fire bolt! I want you to come save me.”

Bull gave her a level stare. “...uh huh.” And didn’t move from his spot.

She sighed, glad that it was so dark that no one could see her blush. “I want to go swimming. But… you can’t watch.”

“You want to go skinny dipping...” Bull said incredulously, “...in the Waking Sea. Y’know I promised that other dude I’d take you back to your camp _alive_ , right?”

“Look, I’ve got a plan. I won’t get cold. And if I start drowning, well, you’re like twice as big as me. Whatever I’m drowning in will probably come up to your fucking kneecaps. So I’ll send a signal and you’ll gallantly come to my rescue.”

Bull gave her that same long, hard stare.

“I _said_ it was stupid,” Asha pleaded, trying to make her expression as hard to say no to as possible. "Please?"

Bull sighed. “Sure. Why the fuck not?” he rubbed the back of his neck, and began to move away to the spot she’d gestured to before. “What could _possibly_ go wrong?”

Asha waited until he was far enough away, and his back was safely turned. “You _cannot_ turn around unless I am in desperate need of help, ok!” she said sternly, as she began to tug her shirt out from her breeches. Then “Oh fuck!”, as the first unforgiving wind hit her bare flesh.

“Got a redhead undressing right next to me and a man can’t even watch,” she heard Bull mutter to himself as she quickly divulged herself of her clothes. Her skin was goosepimpled and she was shivering by the time she was naked, and noticing it told her she was entirely too sober for this endeavour. With a quick muttered breath, she cast rock armour on herself, feeling her skin crust over with a hard layer of slate. The casing covered all of her except her fucking tranquil brand, which started to itch more just because she’d noticed it. The shivering calmed down a little, and she felt heavier as she placed her feet in the water. 

“OOOOOOH fuck!” it was still fucking cold, even if she couldn’t feel it as strongly, and it took a lot of willpower to take the next step. “You do not turn around, ok!” she cried, when she thought she saw Bull instinctively start to move, “I’m doing fine.”

She was waist deep when the first wave crashed into her. Weighed down and protected by armour, she felt the impact of the hit like a bruise, but barely budged an inch. Hitting her stone-hardened skin was like hitting a cliff-face, and the water arched upwards, cold spray hitting her face with a roar. It was ice cold, unforgiving, and invigorating. She walked out until the seawater came up to her chest, past the point where the waves were breaking, so the ocean simply rose and fell around her. She didn’t dare to go further as the floor suddenly bottomed away from her, to unknown depths. 

She breathed in through tight lungs, and cast her head up to the stars as another wave glided past her and broke on the shore. She thought back to all her summers, and a few similarly ill-advised winters, swimming out in this very same ocean, probably hundreds of miles from here. The one time she and Mahanon had drunkenly skinny-dipped in her sixteenth summer, the first time they’d seen each other naked even though they hadn’t even touched each other that day, and it feeling so very new and so very dangerous. It felt like a lifetime ago. She’d known that she would spend her whole life in forests, but she’d always hoped she’d die somewhere close to the sea.

“You doing ok there, boss!” came a call from the shore, sometime later.

“Yeah!” Asha called back, her voice clogged with unshed tears that she tried to swallow away. “I’m good. Not drowning!”

“Think maybe you should come back now.”

“Sure! Just a minute!” she wiped her eyes, then gave a startled laugh when she realised her hands were wet. Well, one way to hide tears was with more salt water.

She dregded herself out of the water, limbs heavy and cold. Her clothes stuck to her when she put them back on, but she was pleased to see that Bull kept his word, and didn’t sneak any peeks at her as she dressed. That she knew of, anyway. She supposed he was a spy, and could probably be really sneaky about the peeks he took, if he wanted to. She dressed with her front facing him, so he would only see all her curvy bits, and not her back.

“You always this _fucking weird_?” he asked her conversationally as he walked her back to camp, watching her shiver as her damp hair clung to her neck.

“Pretty much.” she replied honestly. Even she didn’t fully understand why she’d gone into the water.

He gave her a considering look, lingering on the places where her clothes clung to her in a way that made Asha blush scarlet in the dark. “Well, if it involves you getting naked, sign me up.”

“And this is the training ground where… well, people seem to hit each other a lot? Not sure what the structure is exactly, whether there’s ‘hitting people’ rotas or bookings or whatever,” the Herald’s voice carried over the heads of his recruits, startling Cullen as he looked up from the report he’d been reading from Josephine on the Hinterland resources they now had official permission to mine. Asha was talking animatedly to two men - well, one man and one Qunari, who towered over her by nearly half her height again. “But you _can_ book front row seats to watching me make a fool of myself with Cass, every morning at dawn!”

“You and the Seeker?” the Qunari gave an appreciative rumble, “Maybe I should tell the Chargers to set up camp close by. That I’d like to see.”

Asha laughed, high and bright, “hey! Our official lascivious heckler is Sera, and she takes her job very seriously! Not quite sure what’s so sexy about me crying and retching into the dirt, but hey! To each their own. Cassandra, of course, is a flawless goddess.”

“Who’s in charge here, my lady, may I ask?” came the quiet, subdued question from the other man, in a broad northern Fereldan accent.

“Oh, sorry um… Blackwall? Can I call you Blackwall? Sorry, ‘Gordon’ just feels really weird for some reason…”

Cullen watched as Asha cast a glance around the training yard and then her eyes snagged on him standing there, staring back at her like an idiot. Her face tensed briefly as he watched her visibly steel herself, like his company was equivalent to stepping barefoot on to hot coals, and then she strode over to him, gesturing for the two men to follow.

Expression aside, the Herald looked well. It wasn’t very often that someone returned from the Storm Coast not thoroughly gloomy and miserable and complaining about newfound holes in their boots, but Asha hadn’t been able to stop excitedly asking if there were any routine operations that the Inquisition needed carrying out in the region. She’d been gone a week longer than necessary, and Leliana had begun to worry that they’d lost the Herald to a rogue wave or landslide or something else that laid outside her iron tight control, when Cass sent a brief note claiming they’d taken care of loose ends in the Hinterlands on the way back, now that their numbers were bolstered by their newly hired mercenary band. 

The fresh air - or perhaps the Chargers’ company - had meant that the Herald returned fresh faced and grinning, cheeks reddened with the wind and beginning to freckle from the early spring sun. Steady rations and her training regime had meant she’d gained both weight and muscle. The clothes provided by the Inquisition no longer hung off her frame like laundry on a line, and her once gaunt, hollow face had filled out into a round heart, dimples flashing in the rare moments she smiled in the war room…

 _And you need to stop staring at coworkers you’ve spoken fifty words to at best._ he thought desperately, not for the first time, as Asha reached him with their new recruits close behind. “Greetings, Gentlemen, Lady Asha,” he said, clearing his throat, “The person in charge would be... me.”

“This is Commander Cullen Rutherford,” she made the introductions in a thoroughly perfunctory tone, so different from her laughter just moments before. “He manages the Inquisition’s troops and the training of the recruits. Cullen, this is Warden Blackwall, and this is the Iron Bull, of Bull’s Chargers, the ones who came to headquarters asking for a job.”

“In case the horns and the whole Qunari thing didn’t make all that obvious.” Bull added.

“Good to meet you, Commander,” Blackwall leaned forward for a handshake, “I’m impressed. From what I can see, these are good men.”

Cullen flicked his gaze to the soldiers sparring, wondering if Asha could notice that the templar who’d troubled her previously was back among their number, though his head was down and he studiously ignored them as he worked on refining a newcomer’s parry technique. But the Herald didn’t say anything to contradict the Warden’s assessment “Thank you,” he said, after an awkward pause, “we’ve made the best of what we’ve been given. These were mostly locals, and a few pilgrims willing to fight.”

“You Order trained?” Bull asked, casting his eye over the field.

“I - yes. Cassandra recruited me for the Inquisition from the Kirkwall Order,” Cullen said, trying not to wince at the fact that it seemed that ‘ex-templar’ was going to become the most consistently cited aspect of his personality. “How did you know?”

“Bull’s a Benn Hassreth,” Asha told him simply, as if this explained everything. 

The qunari barked a laugh. “Yes, Red, and we do so love it when people go around announcing that fact at the top of their fucking lungs.”

“What? That’s the reason though, right? Like you didn’t do your research on us before joining,” the Herald replied with a small smile.

“In this case? No.” Bull gestured to the men sparring, “I can tell from the Commander’s men. All these moves? Classic templar moves. Designed for either hitting someone much smaller and weaker, or some fucker that’s probably three times the size of you, with claws. No inbetween.”

Asha pulled a face, but it wasn’t a grimace at the idea of templars attacking mages. It was a moment of curious revelation, and she spun around to try and see what it was that Bull described. “Huh. I mean, we _are_ fighting demons...”

Bull leant over her shoulder - he had to hunker down, she was so small in comparison - and pointed, guiding her sights. “S’not all about the demons. They’re angling their shields down to direct fire and acid away, see? Same as I would any Vint bloodmage.”

“We don’t use _acid_ ,” said Asha, sounding vaguely affronted.

Cullen watched the interaction, noting how close the other warrior was allowed to get to the Herald, despite knowing her barely a week. _And how long have you known her, exactly?_ he thought. Tallying up their terse, uncomfortable conversations would barely get him to two hours, probably. But it was just yet another reminder of how relaxed and carefree she was, with everyone but him.

“So what happens when they get attacked by like… I dunno, Antivan crows on the road? Or Dalish archers?” she mused aloud, “probably smaller than them, but not weaker. And not as obvious as a demon.”

“Exactly.” the qunari gave a grunt of approval at her answer, and straightened, before glancing at Cullen with something like an apology, “no offence my man, you understand. You’re starting with nothing and training them for what they need to fight. That’s the smart thing to do.”

“I’m aware,” Cullen replied dryly. “And we’re more well-rounded than you give us credit for. We _do_ have the Nightingale and her people, to train against.”

“You could help?” Asha offered Bull. “Teach some non-templar techniques?”

Cullen tensed, something he knew did not escape the Qunari’s attention, who had the same unnervingly observant quality to his gaze as Leliana. Was that the plan then? Had the Herald gone about recruiting more warriors to the Inquisition in the hope of ousting him from his position? He couldn’t deny that the thought stung.

“Nah. I’m no good at command unless I know who my guys are sleeping with and what they like to drink,” Bull replied. At the words ‘sleeping with’ Asha’s cheeks began to pink, something which Cullen found strange, given that he had overheard Sera’s commentary on her morning training routine more than once. While the rogue’s descriptive language had certainly expanded his own knowledge of Denerim slang further than he would’ve ever desired, it barely seemed to fluster the Herald. “Think this is a few too many people’s sex lives to keep track of, even for a Benn Hassreth like me.” Bull winked.

“Why would you need to know about people’s sex lives?” Asha said with a false innocence, as pink continued to creep across her cheeks. 

“Ah, Red. Spoken like someone who’s never had to lead.”

“I led an entire clan, I’ll have you know.”

“And you didn’t keep any tabs on what was happening behind closed doors? Those tent flaps were soundproof, were they?” he asked with a knowing grin.

“I- well that’s - I mean -” Asha blinked one, twice, three times, “oh gods, now I’m questioning _everything_ …”

The qunari clapped her on the shoulder with a chuckle. “We’ll make a Benn Hassreth of you yet, boss,” he said, smiling, “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I’ve got to go get my men in order.” 

As he began to walk away, he turned and called over his shoulder “oh, and speaking of ‘sleeping with’, Boss - I’ll get Skinner to the tavern by sundown, if you’d like a follow up on last night!”

“Oh, you _absolute fuck_! You just couldn’t resist, could you, you smug git!?” Asha shouted at his retreating back, her face turning crimson, looking equal parts embarrassed and like she wanted to throw something heavy at him. Cullen noted that Bull had waited until he was very much out of range to say his piece.

At her other side, Blackwall coughed, looking about as awkward as Cullen felt, “‘Skinner’ - wasn’t that the angry elf woman?... I thought it was the nice Tevinter lad you were after?”

How did people know these things about her? Hadn’t Warden Blackwall joined her party _three days ago_?

Asha seemed to be asking herself a similar question, as she put both hands over her face, then looked entreatingly up at the sky like she wanted the Breach to swallow her whole. “ _Ma ghilana mir din'an_ ,” she whispered, with fervent sincerity, raking her fingers across her temples and deep into her hair. 

The silence that followed stretched out a good couple of seconds, and Cullen was about to offer both him and Warden Blackwall an out from the entire situation when, to his horror, the bastard abandoned him. “Yes, well, I believe the Nightingale wanted to talk with me back at the Chantry…?” he muttered, already backing away even as his weak excuse completely failed him.

Which posed a new problem: there was no one left to chaperone the conversation Cullen found himself stuck in with the Herald. He supposed it did not technically violate the terms of Asha’s agreement with Leliana - the two of them were hardly alone, surrounded by the entire Inquisition armed forces. But he shuffled a few steps back from his already respectable distance in the hope of avoiding any potential discomfort or, Maker forbid, wrath.

The Herald sighed heavily through her nose, letting her hair fall back into place as her hands uncurled from her head and she tried to loosen the tension from her body. “That smug bastard ploughed his way through the half the Crossroads camp in four fucking days like he’s trying to single-handedly end the war, but a girl takes _one_ ill-advised tumble and of course _that’s_ what’s noteworthy...”

She trailed off in mortification, seemingly remembering who exactly it was that she was talking to. Cullen couldn’t help but feel a little grateful, having accidentally learnt more about the Herald in the last thirty seconds than he thought perhaps either of them were comfortable with him knowing. He thought he’d spare them both extreme pain. He cleared his throat, found he had to clear it again, and then said, “well, my Lady, if that’s all…”

“Yes!” she said sharply, as if reacting on instinct. Cullen worked hard at keeping his face impassive at the abrupt dismissal, but was then surprised when she shut her eyes regretfully and placed a hand to her temple, as if nursing some kind of headache. She cast him an apologetic look, “Sorry, no, actually. There was something I wanted to say to you.”

She was clearly uncomfortable. Cullen cast a glance around, seeing if he could spot Cassandra anywhere nearby, “I can get a third person…”

“No, it’s ok! I think there are already _more than enough_ people here! ” Asha said, her face still bright red and vaguely pained, folding her arms over her chest, “I’m sorry. That was rude. I’m just embarrassed.”

“Understandable, really,” Cullen replied, “I’d be a little embarrassed too, after that.”

Now, where in the Maker’s name had that come from? He hoped it had sounded teasing, and not just flat out offensive. Though really, was teasing any better, considering his relationship with the Herald?

Asha’s eyes fluttered closed again momentarily, as if she was fighting another bodily cringe, but she recovered quickly. “I’ve been meaning to say thank you,” she forced out.

“Oh?” That was certainly unexpected. “What for, exactly?”

“For what you did the other week, with Madame Vivienne,” Asha shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “Not exactly my finest moment.” She froze, considering, “though it’s looking pretty damn fine right now, honestly.”

“Oh! Really, it was no trouble,” said the Commander, with the ease of a man who’d now dedicated several days to repressing the memory of how Vivienne’s sixteen suggestions for marriage alliances - and her offers to facilitate them - had somehow tagged themselves onto the end of what had seemed like an uncomfortable but mostly harmless conversation about mages and lyrium provisions. 

He remembered the Herald running in with a streak of dark ash marring her forehead and hairline, wild panic in her eyes. At first he’d thought she was hurt, and then genuinely worried that she’d set something ablaze. The latter was the act of an overzealous imagination, really - he’d recently realised that with all of Haven’s buildings being wooden, and that they needed to start setting up countermeasures for that. When he’d realised the actual, mundane source of her consternation, well, it had seemed wonderfully easy to just step up and relieve her of her source of distress. 

Of course, that was before he’d quite realised that Vivienne was trying to recruit him for her new College of Enchanters, the Circles in all but name. He’d had to explain his retirement from active templar duty at great length before she accepted he was a lost cause. But at least that meant the Herald had got a full afternoon’s reprieve from what he was guessing was the same sales pitch, which would have gone down with her like a lead balloon, with possibly just as much destruction.

He also remembered his method for instigating the distraction. “Oh. And I hope you didn’t think I meant any of what I said about you. All that ‘unfit for leadership’ stuff. I made it up on the spot. It was just that the First Enchanter struck me as having somewhat of an ego-”

Asha snorted, and then shared a surprised glance with Cullen when they both realised he’d actually made her laugh. “Yes,” she said, somewhat diplomatically, “you could, perhaps, say that.”

“I believe Josephine has her focused on establishing our connections with the Orlesian nobility, now,” Cullen offered, hoping it would reassure her, “she shouldn’t be intervening too heavily with the mages in Haven. And if you recruit Fiona, well, you’ll have an already functional infrastructure that even Madame de Fer would struggle to displace-”

Asha cocked her head, surprised, “you’d be ok with the Grand Enchanter here in Haven?”

Cullen couldn’t help but feel vaguely amused. “What, you think the Inquisition has enough sway to sever the rebel mages from their leader? I think even Cassandra would term that ‘ambitious’.”

“No, I more just meant-”

“There’s no need to retread what you think of me, Lady Asha, I’m more than aware,” Cullen said levelly, fighting to keep exasperation out of his voice as he settled for their first vaguely congenial conversation, “Honestly, it’s not Grand Enchanter Fiona that has me concerned - I had a great respect for her, the few times I met her. But there _will_ be abominations and blood mages in her ranks, that much is certain. The rebel mages are too big and too desperate for men to vet every person that joins their cause. Your reports of the Hinterlands say as much. I simply don’t want those kinds of people having access to the Breach.”

He was worried that perhaps he’d gone too far, but the Herald instead looked thoughtful. “Oh. Well, yeah. That actually… makes total sense.”

“With Leliana’s help, I’ve started to put precautions in place that will mean that we have some hope of containing that threat. From what Solas says, it is likely a handful of powerful, trusted mages will be enough to close the Breach, and Leliana, Vivienne, and I have enough combined knowledge between us to decide who amongst the rebels should be included in that number. We still don’t know who caused the Breach, and Fiona’s absence from the Conclave is a cause for concern that I do not think we should overlook, but one that we’re much more prepared to deal with now than we were even just a few months ago. Now, I think of the alliance as more of a calculated risk. Still perhaps not the one I would’ve made personally... but with a former tranquil mage as our figurehead, it was unlikely the majority of the Order would have agreed to join anyway. You pose too much threat to their main source of power, and your circumstances make you a much more suitable figure for the mages to rally behind. In fact, I’m surprised they haven’t started a narrative about how you represent a divine sanction of their cause. They should be clamouring to be at your side. They have the chance to redeem themselves from all the violence they wrought, through you. We have a chance to action real change here, and maybe I’d wouldn't judge them so harshly, if they proved themselves to be willing participants. Even with the mages, there’s so much we can-”

Asha was watching him with a rather startled expression. Not one of fright, but more one of bemusement, like he started talking to her in a different language, or just rolled up a trouser leg to reveal he was wearing fishnet stockings underneath his armour. And while he’d done neither of those things, he realised that he’d been talking. A lot. These arguments were the kind he'd had to rehearse - first to himself, to make his peace with losing a templar alliance, then to every new recruit who rocked up in Haven with uncertainty, or a score to settle.

He’d made it over those fifty words, at least.

“My apologies,” Cullen said, cutting his diatribe short, “I doubt you came here for a lecture.”

“No I didn’t,” Asha replied, somewhat curt, but with a marginally less obvious amount of usual brusqueness. Then her shoulders relaxed a little, and she said, “but then you weren’t standing around here waiting for someone to give you an insight into my sex life, so…”

“Ha, quite!” Cullen couldn’t help but smile, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. 

“Well…” Asha said into the silence, “I’m going to… go…”

He felt something deflate in his chest - he didn’t know if he was relieved to find their conversation was so civilly concluded, or disappointed to have it end. At least he hadn’t managed to mortally offend her, which he definitely took as a victory. “By all means.”

“And… thank you, Commander, I mean it,” she said, with a somewhat painful smile. “Varric thoroughly scolded me for how childish I was being. It didn’t exactly paint me in the best light, so…”

“Think nothing of it, Asha,” he took a few steps back so that they could both gracefully exit with their dignity somewhat intact, “truly, it was no hardship.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hands up if you were "today" days old when you found out that Thom Rainier's full pseudonym is "Gordon Blackwall"? Because I had to look it up specifically for that one throwaway line from Asha, and I was lowkey horrified by what I found. Warden Gordon Blackwall. Oh my.
> 
> This is probably my most self-indulgent chapter of fic yet, and I don't know what that says about me, given the contents. It even has bullshit artistic reinterpretations of Dragon Age spells for thoroughly pointless purposes, which is entirely my jam! The first half in the Storm Coast was written to combat my first proper bout of writer's block, and then I liked it too much to edit it out. So thank you for sitting through my dumb descriptions of nature and Asha's penchant for skinny dipping (which will, in fact, turn up in later parts of this fic, so I guess I can *maybe* call it plot relevant?)  
> 
> 
> Anyway... actual author's note: "Ma ghilana mir din'an" (what Asha says when she wishes everyone didn't know about her sex life) translates as "Guide me into death" - taken from DA canon elven, not Project Elvhen


	22. Chapter Twenty-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We finally meet Dorian (YEEES!!) and Asha finds out about oculara (NOOO!!)

“Fascinating. How does that work exactly?”

“Hnnnghf.” Was Asha’s… articulate response, as one of the most beautiful men she’d ever seen _in her life_ turned to engage her in conversation.

He laughed, his whole face lighting up, and she was pretty sure her heart almost stopped beating in her chest entirely. Just look at that jawline! And his undercut was even more badass than hers! “You don’t even know, do you? You wiggle your fingers, and boom! Rift closes.”

“Unh, um, hi, um... who are you?”

“Ah, getting ahead of myself I see. Dorian of House Pavus, most recently of Minrathous.” Dorian reached out for her for anchor hand and kissed it debonairly, with a wink she felt all the way to her toes, “How do you do?”

“Good!” Asha said, slightly shrilly, in this room of butchered demons, and apparent time distortions. “I mean, I’m well, thank you. Just grand! Are you… good?”

“Don’t go breaking Skinner’s heart, boss,” came the Iron Bull’s amused voice from behind her, “not that I’d exactly blame you, but the pretty ones are always the worst.”

Asha cast a quick glare over her shoulder at Bull. If the Benn Hassreth was half as good as he claimed to be, he would already know that she’d only slept with Skinner the once. And she’d been so drunk at the time that, while she remembered what happened once she was in the other woman’s tent with perfect clarity, and had also remembered at the time to keep her shirt on her back even as other clothes came off, she wasn’t even quite sure how she’d even managed getting to that point. The next time she’d attempted to speak with her, more out of good manners than anything, Skinner had been so terse and circumspect with her language that Asha had begun awkwardly overcompensating with conversation that clearly bored the her. She soon found herself wondering how she’d ever managed to bed the rogue in the first place. Maybe Skinner had just had the same itch needing scratching, and done all the work of courtship for her. There were no imaginary futures being built out of that encounter, though it had certainly been enjoyable at the time.

It would have been nice if she could go one day without the teasing, though. It was like being a teenager in Clan Lavellan again. Only this time she didn’t have dirt on everyone else to threaten mutually assured destruction and gain some modicum of peace. Maybe she could ask Leliana for some...

Dorian began talking about his relationship to Magister Alexius and the Venatori cult, and she tried her best to pay attention while also marvelling at how both his hair and his snow white robes were seemingly spotless despite them both battling a bunch of rift demons. Meanwhile, she was still pretty sure she had a chunk of shade stuck somewhere in her hair. Why was she the one who was always sticky and covered in grime by the end of every mission? _Clearly he’s going to have to join the Inquisition,_ she thought to herself. He was even prettier than Cullen.

“Alexius’ magic can really control time?” she asked, incredulous, and curious despite herself. She more than anyone could see the appeal of trying to turn back the clock to fix past mistakes - which was why it was probably better for that kind of magic to stay firmly in the 'impossible' for her. “That sounds... incredibly difficult. And messy.”

“It is almost certainly dangerous, if true,” Solas said, with a knowing glance in her direction. “You can’t change things on that scale, no matter how much you might want to.”

Asha was almost relieved when Dorian admitted how wildly unstable it was. She’d felt something ugly and selfish beginning to rise up in her chest with the possibility of accessing such a force, and looked on the situation with too keen sympathy when Felix arrived and admitted that his father was doing all of this solely for him. That was something Asha had absolutely no problem understanding. What would’ve happened to the Breach if, somehow, she could make it so she hadn’t been at the Conclave to testify? Did she… actually care? That was a dangerous question to ask.

“I can’t stay in Redcliffe. Alexius doesn’t know I’m here, and I want to keep it that way for now,” Dorian said. “When you’re ready to deal with him, I want to be there. I’ll be in touch.”

“Wait - what!?” Asha said, looking around her assorted party in confusion. “We’re not going to delay _again_ , are we? Waiting around was probably half the reason why Alexius got here when he did!”

“It doesn’t exactly… work like that,” Dorian observed. “He made it so that you were always going to arrive after him. Time isn’t something necessarily measured by increments - it’s an experiential phenomena. It wasn’t like he just tore a hole in time to move their appointment up by a week in their shared calendar.”

“The situation’s changed, Flash,” Varric told her, “if the Imperium’s involved and the Nightingale didn’t even know about it, the trap we’re walking into is literally worse than anything we could’ve imagined. We need the others’ input.”

“I managed to distract father enough so that he didn’t try to trap you now,” Felix said. “You can get out of Redcliffe, plan a more concerted attack.”

“But… no! You heard what that man was saying! He’s going to conscript children into the military! He’s making them all into _slaves_. We have to stop him!”

“And I do not doubt he will kill you, my dear, if you attack him now.” Dorian chided gently.

“I’d like to see him try!” Asha spat.

“Boss-”

“Asha.” Solas put a hand on her shoulder, and it was not particularly gentle, like he was forcibly grounding her. She looked at him, feeling the futile anger and frustration that had been welling up in her ever since that odious magister had looked at her and her anchor like she was a specimen he’d gladly put in a cage exposed under the knowing eyes of her friend. And it was futile, she realised. Nothing would be gained from bursting in with no kind of plan. 

“We can’t be stupid in this,” Solas murmured. “We’ll only have one chance.”

“Fine.” she replied, hollowly. “Fine.” She looked around the decimated Redcliffe chantry, “this is way above my pay grade, anyway.”

They tried their best to sneak out of Redcliffe, in case Alexius had changed his mind on springing whatever trap he’d had planned for her. They decided skirting the lake was their best bet, as it seemed that the main thoroughfare was now clogged with incoming Tevinter mages, and the villagers and rebel mages that were trying to escape the village’s fate. They didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire. There were screams and shouts, and Asha could already smell the burnt air quality that heralded nearby magical combat, but as much as she wanted to help she knew on a logical level it would provide the perfect distraction for stealing a boat and getting back to Haven as soon as possible. Dorian had already left them, slinking into the shadows to gods knew where. She felt cowardly, and sick to her stomach, wondering how many mages would actually escape, how many would die, and how many would survive only to be shipped off to Tevinter before she even made it back to her counsellors.

“There’s nothing we can do for them, not right now,” Solas murmured next to her. She forged ahead, pretending she hadn’t heard.

It was as they made it through the angry crowds and to the docks that she felt it. 

It was unlike anything she’d ever felt, not quite terror, not quite despair. It was even something entirely foreign to the pulses of the anchor. Something cold, slick and terrible, an unpleasantly needling sensation running down her spine and setting her teeth on edge. For a few moments it just felt unpleasant, like the sense of being watched. Then her tranquil brand suddenly flared ice cold between her shoulder blades, to the point of being painful. The first time it had done _anything_ , other than itch and plague her every subconscious thought. She jumped like someone had startled her and stumbled, gasping, bile rising in her throat. 

Solas looked at her, confused. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I - my brand - it’s hurting me - oh gods,” she looked up at him, certain that her face would be one of absolute terror. Was this Alexius’ trap? The reason why he’d stared at her so hungrily as they’d sat across from each other in the Gull and Lantern? Did he know something about her tranquility? Gods, did he know how to strengthen it? Was she - “ _Solas!_ ”

“It’s ok, _lethallan,_ ” he gripped her arms, giving her a quick assessment, with a small frown creasing his brow. “I don’t notice anything about your aura, and it still seems intact. Nothing is being smothered. Tell me what you feel.”

Asha tried to take a deep breath through her nose, fighting down the rise of instinctual panic. Once she’d gotten over the initial shock, she realised that her immediate snap towards fear had exaggerated the sensation for her. The brand was painfully cold, but nothing else seemed to be wrong with her body or her mind.

“You doing ok there, boss?”

Asha shut her eyes and tried to find her magic. She almost sobbed when she found it was there, ready and waiting as if nothing was wrong. But still her brand radiated cold from under her shirt, and now she was beginning to shiver, the hairs on her arms raising up.

 _Help us, little dreamer._

She jumped at the invasion of her mind, and knew Solas must've felt it from where he was holding her steady. She’d imagined that, surely? And if she hadn’t. Oh gods.

“What is it?” her friend asked. That told her that, despite being a mage, he hadn’t heard it. Which was… bad.

She opened her eyes, “something really fucking weird is going on. My brand, it feels... wrong. And - and - something just… spoke to me.”

“Five words you never want to hear from a mage,” Bull grunted from his position keeping look out.

“Yeah, I’m right there with you,” she muttered, “except I’m pretty certain I have to be asleep before any demons start conversing with me in my mind.”

“You said your brand feels strange?”

Asha had an idea. She shrugged off Solas’ grip and took three steps back up the way they’d came. Immediately, her brand died, returning to its normal state of itchy yet inert, and she let out a breath of relief at having some respite from the awful, terrifying sensation. Two steps back towards them, and it flared up again hard enough to make her gasp.

“You sure there’s no aura shift?” she asked Solas incredulously, wincing at the returning cold.

“None. Whatever is affecting you, it’s an outside influence,” her friend examined her expression, “I can dispel, if you like?”

“So can I, but give me a second.” She glanced around their surroundings, wondering what could cause something so strange and unfamiliar to trigger. Other than a few rowing boats at the docks, the only thing of note were a few small fisherman’s huts, ramshackle and mildewed. Biting her lip, she took a step closer to the nearest one, and then gasped when the feeling between her shoulders grew even stronger, like a despair demon had breathed directly down her neck. Five more steps, the horrible needling pain was everywhere, like she’d stepped into an ice cold shower. 

_Help us. Free us. Little Dreamer._

Her tranquil brand was acting erratically and she was hearing voices asking to be freed. That kind of shit was an immediate red flag for any mage. Which was why she even cursed herself a little when she said:

“We need to get in that building.”

“Are... you sure that’s wise?”

“No, Solas, but we’re going in anyway,” Asha said through teeth gritted against the pain. “If Alexius or the Rebel Mages had anything to do with the Breach, and now there’s something in Redcliffe sending my tranquility haywire, I wanna fucking know what it is.”

She strode over to the hut, her every nerve crying out at the incredible _wrongness_ of whatever magic pervaded the area. It was like someone was raking fingers down her back, clawed ones. She tried the handle, then grunted when it was locked.

“Let me, Flash,” Varric said, though he sounded less than enthusiastic as he moved in with his picks.

She barged past him the moment the lock snicked open, desperate to find the source of this awful feeling and then get it to stop. The room was dark, empty, and smelt faintly of rotting fish, and she was squinting in the black for a few seconds before her eyes adjusted. She saw vague, pale objects lining the walls. They sparkled and glinted opalescent in the light from the open door, and slowly formed into recognisable shapes.

Skulls.

They neatly lined the shelves, as if they’d been placed there like ornaments in a trinket cabinet. Heart in her throat, she moved forward, holding up the anchor as it flared and cast light over the room. The glint from the skulls came stronger, and she noticed that in every hollow eye socket sat a gem, perfectly cut and no doubt worth a lot of money. “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the _fuck_ ,…” she whispered, as her skin crawled with horror. Behind her, she heard Bull let out a stream of Qunlat curse words before he said, “nope, fuck this. I’m out. I’ll keep watch.”

The door shut behind them, and Varric took a flare from his belt and struck it, warm light illuminating the space. There must’ve been twenty or so skulls, and when Asha took another step closer she gasped, as her senses were flooded.

_Help us. Save us. We are trapped._

She stumbled back, unable to deal with such an intensely wrong feeling. Even worse, it seemed only to affect her as her two companions moved further into the room without any apparent concerns. “What the _fuck_ is going on?” she whispered, looking at the skulls that seemed to watch her back despite their hollow, unseeing eyes. She leaned in closer, saw the white oval of her fact reflected in one of the gemstones. Being this close made her feel like her skin was encased in a winter's grasp, crackling and shifting like the first thaw in spring.

The next words in the silence were Solas, who’d moved to rifle through the papers on the desk in the far corner. “ _Su an’banal i’ma._ ”

“What? What is it?”

He glanced up, mouth tightening. “Asha, I don’t think you should-” 

But Asha had already ground her teeth together and stepped in closer, “What does it say?”

“Asha-”

“Just fucking _tell me_ , Solas.”

His eyes skimmed the page, “It says… if I am to understand the theory correctly, it states that these... artefacts... are the product of a tranquil under demon possession.”

“Well, what the fuck does that mean? Demons can’t possess tranquil. That’s the whole point of being tranquil!”

“Here, see?” he pointed to a passage in the hastily scribbled notes: “‘Remember, the skull will only attune properly if the Tranquil is in close proximity to one of the shards when the demon is forced to possess him. Even then, the blow must be delivered immediately. The oculara produced from Tranquil... killed… even minutes later failed to illuminate the shards when used.’” He rushed the final sentence, wincing when he glanced up at the look on her face, “The notes say... the tranquil were vulnerable after the Circle collapsed. The rebels didn’t take them in. Their… ‘master’... took advantage of that.”

Asha looked at him, barely comprehending. She remembered what the qunari guard had said to her when she’d first arrived at the Conclave months ago - that tranquil had been noticeably absent from any of the Rebel Mages’ proceedings, and that she’d only been an exception because she served as a convenient prop for their cause. Well, now she had the answer to that mystery, she thought, wondering if she was going to be sick right then and there. Her already numb body became chiller by degrees, matching the heavy, cold ball of rage that seethed in her gut, utterly frustrated at her powerlessness. The tranquil had been abandoned for their same weakness, and now the Venatori had been preying on them, turning them into the lifeless tools everyone saw them as even as they lived and breathed. 

This strange, foreign, and _evil_ magic was what had set her tranquil brand off. Like her, these tranquil had had their connection to the fade forcibly reforged - just with terrible, impossible consequences. Was it some kind of empathetic link, a side effect of whatever had somehow imbued their branded bodies with a new form of magic? A last desperate warning from the souls who’d died still trapped in awful slumber?

_Yes, we are trapped here. You can get us home, Little Dreamer. Help us. You have the key._

The key? What did they - Asha looked at lifeless eyes watching her from the shelves, then down at the anchor, and swallowed as everything clicked, sickeningly, into place.

The voices she was hearing weren’t the tranquil who’d been murdered. They were gone - they were _dead_. There was only one kind of voice that could now insinuate itself into her head. These whispers were from the demons who’d possessed tranquil bodies, moments before death.

That was why the feeling that spiralled out from her brand and gripped her felt a little bit like terror, a little bit like despair, a lot like rage. It was all of those things. The only life left in these monstrous artefacts was that which thrived on death and pain.

 _Yes. Now you understand. Save us. Release us these bindings._ And then the voices took on another, discordant note, almost hungry where they spoke in the back of her mind, _avenge us. We will lend you our power._

Something new flared across her skin then. Tried to claw its way into her mind.

“Asha…” Solas was moving gently towards her, hands outstretched like she was a frightened animal he had to calm.

Asha’s blood was loud in her ears.

If... if tranquil could still be possessed by demons and turned into some new kind of abomination, then what was even the _point_? The rite truly was a needless cruelty.

She stumbled backwards from the wall of skulls and from Solas' outstretched hand, almost drunkenly, and barrelled out of the door before the demons inside that room could hear those thoughts and latch onto them, turn them into something even more sinister. Bull gave her a surprised look as she ran into the daylight, stopping just outside of the area in which she could hear the demons’ desperate lament. The pain from her brand died and she bent double, breathing fast. She wasn’t sick. But she was… she couldn’t describe it. She felt tainted. That crawling, slick feeling didn’t leave her even as she stepped outside of its radius.

How dare those demons ask her for help? They were not the victims in this. The victims had died silent, forgotten. They’d never _had_ a voice.

“Asha, _lethallan_ , I’m so sorry,” Solas was next to her, but she didn’t want him touching her, she didn’t want anyone touching her. She ducked away from him, tripping and nearly falling.

“The Venatori - Alexius - they-”

“We will inform the Inquisition of this,” her friend told her in a hard voice, a hard, predatory look in his eyes, “and they _will_ pay.”

“We were all just _abandoned_ ,” she knew she was incoherent, not making sense. She hadn’t been abandoned, had she? The rebel mages had loved her, because she was _useful_. “And they - and they-”

“Flash-”

“We’re all so fucking weak,” she said, and now she didn’t know what ‘we’ she was talking about, as she looked up at them all, anger and fear and _rage_ bright and hot in her chest. It overflowed and spilled out of her like bile. “Everyone fears us, thinks we can destroy them. But we’re all so fucking weak and that means that monsters like Alexius can hunt us down and no one cares and now look at us - look at me! Are we just going to let him sit in Redcliffe and kill more tranquil and clean their bones and then order mages to their death? So long as we can do _more planning_? All we really want is from them is help anyway, so who _cares_ if a few more die while we’re sitting here on our asses-"

“Asha,” Solas had moved forward and tried to touch her, and she felt something - a foreign presence once more crashing over her, but entirely different from the aura that emanated from the oculara. This one was calming, peaceful, warm where everything had been cold, and she felt it try and wrestle with the rage that was bubbling up within her, to muffle and placate her anger. The feeling of peace was incongruous with her roiling mass of emotions, and unnaturally strong, like a blanket smothering out a fire. 

She looked at Solas, glared at him, and saw the horrific moment of revelation when he realised she knew exactly what he was trying to do. Did he think she was stupid? She shook it off. They’d been practising that spell just last week, figuring it would help them avoid needless skirmishes with bandits who were desperate and didn’t know any better.

He was trying to calm her emotions. To _stop her feeling_.

He wanted her tranquil.

“How fucking _dare_ you?” she hissed, her hurt and anger now increasing ten-fold. She felt like she could burn the whole of Redcliffe to the ground, in that moment.

“Asha, please, you’re not thinking-”

She cast mindblast before Solas could finish his sentence, and it caught her three companions so completely by surprise that all of them were thrown backwards, even Bull. Varric was the first to recover, watching her in confusion as he rolled up to a crouch. She felt the tiniest speck of guilt, but it was overcome by her desperate need for action.

“Alexius dies.” she told him, as her breath came in pants, “ _now._ ”

And then she fade-stepped away. After all, you could make it so much further, if you just willed yourself not to feel the cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, writing my first piece of official, *official* canon divergence: "oh no, I thought fanfic meant I didn't have to think too hard about plot?"
> 
> Also, I feel like this is my first proper cliffhanger in this fic! Asha is PISSED. I wanted to write about her reaction to the disappearance of the tranquil, and to also explore another wonderful piece of worldbuilding that DA just introduces and then... brushes off. Lots of artistic license, but I refuse to believe this much murder should go completely unremarked upon, especially considering that in-game the shards are like, completely worthless and also The Worst.
> 
> On a lighter author's note: Asha's reaction to Dorian is true bisexual representation, because every friend I have regardless of gender has fallen in love with him at first sight.


	23. Chapter Twenty-Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha confronts Alexius (like a badass).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: violence, blood

Asha fade-stepped through the gates of the Redcliffe fortress, nearly blind with rage. Her limbs ached with the unnatural chill as mist rolled off her frostbitten skin in waves. Her mana was almost gone, but something drove her forward, something that overrode all the logical parts of her brain.

None of her party had been able to catch up with her in time. It had been no more than five minutes since she left them down by the docks.

“Halt!” came a cry from one of the parapets, and she saw another magister in a strange winged hood, levelling his staff at her from his place by the castle entrance.

She thrust the anchor into the air, waving it as she shouted back, “I'm the Herald of Andraste. I think your master _might_ want to see me.”

Shouting was good. It meant she didn’t have to fight to keep her voice level, to pretend that she wasn’t fighting an overwhelming tide of anger and pain. As the magister lowered his weapon and nodded for her to ascend the steps, it took all of her fraying self control not to just kill him where he stood.

But he was not the one responsible.

Six masked guards came out to flank her, and she was led deep into the bowels of the Redcliffe Keep. As she passed through dark, shadowed corridors that had been kept deliberately lightless, the stupidity of this decision truly began to catch up with her. She counted anything between ten and thirty magisters on her walk through Redcliffe’s halls - she wasn’t entirely clear on what the colour coding of the Tevinter uniforms and masks actually meant. And that was disregarding the rebel mages she glimpsed, cowering under their guards’ watchful eyes and watching her progress through the halls with wide-eyed confusion. Hopefully they would not want to protect Alexius from her. Even so, with the best odds being eleven to one, she knew there was no real way she’d make it back out of this castle alive. You didn’t just walk up to your enemy’s gates and entertain any hopes of walking out again.

Asha wasn’t really sure she cared. She was experiencing the world in tunnel vision, her pulse loud in her ears, rage throbbing throughout her entire body as she felt her mana slowly return. There wasn’t much space for anything else.

In the end, Asha didn’t even see the point of keeping proper track of her route as she was finally brought to a large chamber somewhere deep within the fortress, with thick stone pillars lining each wall and a throne at the far end. It was empty. The guards deposited her in the centre under the grand, vaulted ceilings, and moved into positions on either side of the hall, standing between the pillars. Asha looked at each one of them in turn, unable to determine age or gender from behind their blank, metallic masks with their exaggerated, monstrous features.

Six mages. She was almost insulted. She didn't know how many waited behind any of the doors, but if it was only six mages between her and Gereon Alexius, she thought she'd at least have a good chance at killing him before they took her down.

“Ah, my friend, it’s so good to see you again, and so _soon_ ,” came an oily voice from a door in the corner of the chamber. Alexius entered, flanked by Felix on one side, and a lost-looking Fiona on the other. He looked at her with a predatory glint in his eye, not bothering to hide his satisfaction of a trap successfully sprung, which was clear in his expression. Asha’s vision flared white at the edges as pure, unadulterated fury burned in her veins at the sight of him. She simply did her level best to keep it off her face. It seemed like her murderous rage wasn’t immediately clear: the look Felix had upon seeing her was one of bemused horror, rather than fear. He’d expected her to be gone, and safely out of Redcliffe by now.

“Where, may I ask, are your companions?” Alexius drawled as he settled into his seat on the throne, his voice pitched to carry the gulf of distance between them. “I found the elf particularly... charming.”

 _All I have to do is get his guard down,_ thought Asha, _he doesn’t want me dead just yet. He wants to toy with me first._

“I abandoned them when they decided to flee the village.”

“Oh?” that caught his attention.

“I want to join you,” she lied, and her voice came out cold, a savage thing. She did not sound like herself. But then, such ruthless detachment might mean that it also did not sound entirely like a lie.

Alexius was clearly surprised by her words, though he tried and failed to hide it. He readjusted his position in his seat, and steepled his fingers, cocking his head to the side. “Really? And what have I done to earn the… admiration of the Inquisition’s fabled Herald, that you would switch your allegiance so quickly?”

“I only agreed to join the Inquisition because I had no other options,” Asha said in that same distant and alien voice, “Now, I have options.”

“How very adaptable of you.”

“I do what I need to assure my survival. If I hadn’t pledged myself to the Inquisition, I would’ve been an apostate alone in a foreign country. As a fellow mage, I’m sure you understand my circumstances.”

Alexius smiled. “Well, if that’s the case, I’m sure we can work out some arrangement that is equitable to all parties.”

 _Murderer_. Asha thought, and returned his smile with a baring of teeth.

She needed a plan. She could try and take out the six other mages in this room first, but that would give Alexius a chance to realise what was happening, and potentially escape from her. However, drawing her staff from her back would alert them all to her intentions immediately, and the six guards would likely be upon her before she even had the chance to cast. But… she needed something stronger than an unassisted casting. She needed something that would drop him where he stood, something he wouldn’t expect or see coming.

Something like -

...could she do it? 

She stepped forward, a few paces closer to the dias, and felt the whole room tense aroun dher. She smirked, “I know you want to kill me.”

“If you believe that, I marvel that you chose to come here anyway. After I so kindly let you leave, untouched and unharmed. Few would seek out their murderer twice within the hour.”

“There’s no need to dodge the question - I just want to acknowledge the fact so we can work out how to change it. How can I negotiate without referencing the current state of affairs?” Asha took another step, heard the guards behind her shift uncomfortably, halted and held her arms out in her best mimicry of harmlessness. “I’m sure there’s a way for me to be more useful to your cause alive,” she waggled the fingers on her anchor hand meaningfully, “ _surely?_ ” 

“She - she knows everything, father. I spoke to her earlier, in the chantry,” said Felix, stuttering nervously, clearly at a loss to what was happening. Asha gave him a sharp glance, warning him to silence. If he mentioned anything about Dorian or time magic, she was pretty certain Alexius would be put on the defensive and she’d lose her chance.

“Felix, what have you done?”

“It seems he knew better than you did how to find an ally for your cause,” she interjected smoothly, hoping she still sounded suitably like someone who would betray everything at the drop of a hat. She simply flashed back to the oculara, and found that her voice easily regained that hard, furious quality. “The Inquisition wants my anchor and your mages to close the Breach. _I_ just want to find a way I can be a mage in this world, and stay alive. Your plans with the Venatori sound like the perfect means to that end.”

“...I confess, Herald. I’m not sure I believe you.”

“I just abandoned all my allies and walked into the belly of your fortress with no one else at my back,” she countered, “either I want to join you, or I’m very, very stupid.”

Alexius paused, giving her a long, considering look. She held his gaze, and kept a smile on her face. Clearly uncertain as to what exactly he saw, the magister held out a hand to her, and beckoned her forward. “Show me the mark.”

Finally, an opportunity to close the distance between them. Asha eagerly moved forward, hand outstretched, using the anchor as a pretext for getting just within reach. “Stay there!” Alexius barked, when she got close, but she could tell from his posture and that same satisfied look that he wasn’t truly worried. She had no blades visibly on her, and he was now outside of the best range for a spell attack. As far as he was concerned, the only way she could make him hurt was, well, if she started bashing him with her staff.

He scooted forward in his throne and leaned over to examine her outstretched fingers. “You still have no idea what this does, do you?” he murmured, his words an echo of Dorian’s, as he hungrily watched the green energy dance along her palm like ripples on water.

“You could enlighten me,” she replied easily.

“It’s not your place. This belongs to your betters. You wouldn’t even begin to understand its purpose.”

“I’m a fast learner.”

Alexius glanced at her, unimpressed, but then she held his gaze without flinching. His mouth quirked with a smile, “It is destined to be used in the service of one only just returned to us. He knows the true place of mages in this world, and will make the whole of Thedas bow to us once more. We will rule from the Boeric Ocean to the Frozen Seas.”

From the corner of her eye, Asha saw Grand Enchanter Fiona wheel to look at her new master. She looked horrified by what was apparently a very new revelation of Alexius' motives.

Asha kept her face impassive. “That would be who wanted the Divine dead, then. Is he a mage himself?

“Ha! Foolish girl. The Elder One has power you could not even begin to comprehend.” Alexius once more looked at her anchor, tapping an index finger against the centre of her palm, “Your Inquisition thinks this mark belongs to Andraste, but soon it will be the symbol of an entirely different god.”

“I never believed in Andraste, anyway,” Asha told him honestly, inching forward ever so slightly more while he was distracted. She was working off of memories that were two years out of date, but she thought that perhaps now she was within a workable range for her plan.

He let out a small chuckle, dropping his hands from hers to regard her. “Look at you, Herald. So fierce. So self-assured! Fascinating. I can see why people follow you.You walk into my stronghold with no one, and this stolen mark - a gift you don’t even understand - on your hand in front of me like an offering, and you still act like you’re in control?”

Asha could’ve laughed right then and there. If only he knew. Never had she felt more out-of-control than she did in that moment.

“Why?” she asked him quietly, “are _you_?”

She sent her awareness internally to stoke that hot, ice-bright coal of rage at the centre of her chest. Then, with her heart in her throat, her mana replenished, and her willpower intertwined fully with the weight of the fury that sat heavy inside her, she sent a silent prayer up to Elgar'nan, asking for him to smile upon her desperate bid for revenge. 

And summoned her spirit blade into her hand.

There was a flash of white energy, and both she and Alexius cried out in pain as the long-sword manifested in the closed space between them. She had no hilt crafted to encase the mana-forged blade, so instead she found herself holding the pure arcane energy in her bare, marked hand, sharp edges and burning white hot pain biting into the skin of her palm. Whatever agony she felt on contact with her sword, Alexius fared far worse: the blade had formed between them so that its length speared him through his shoulder where he had bent to examine the anchor. Blood welled up between her fingers as she blindly drove the blade forward, carving downward and hitting resistance that she thought must be one of his ribs. He groaned in pain as a wet stain began to grow on the front of his robes. A green pendant fell out from his gaping neckline as he doubled over, glinting in the light.

“Father!” Felix cried, rushing forward.

Asha grunted. The sword wavered in her grasp. Alexius cried as the blade shifted and flickered, and reformed an inch or so down from its original place in his torso. The spirit that gave the blade its energy could not be so easily contained without its casing, and she felt it begin to slip away, without the right incantation to bind it. She pushed forward with more fervour, bearing down on the blade, desperate to finish this before her strength left her.

She became aware of the hot blood pumping from her hand, wetting her skin and the sleeve of her shirt, and remembered the whispers of the demons in the hut. The right words, the right plea for assistance, and she’d have an unlimited source of power for this endeavour. She’d be unstoppable.

Asha gritted her teeth against the wild impulse. Whatever else she was, she was not a blood mage.

At that thought, reality intervened. She heard the guards begin to move behind her, and with a frustrated growl she dropped the spirit blade spell to fling a barrier over herself, just in time to meet a barrage from behind as all six opened fire on her. That barrier was gone in moments, and she felt an errant flame singe across her cheek. She spun, saw the six magisters moving from their positions at the walls, closing in on her while they wove stronger spells. She needed to hit them before any were barriered.

 _Did any of them craft the oculara?_ she wondered. She had no way of knowing. All she did know was that her anger would be what carried her through this battle, and so she cast her mind back to the docks where she’d last spoken with Solas, and used the pain of that fresh betrayal to attempt casting three fire mines under their unsuspecting feet.

She succeeded - perhaps only because the mines didn’t have to last very long at all to hurt their targets. The entire room flared in an explosion of orange light as all three were immediately triggered, the smell of charred clothing and flesh filling up the room. The mages cried out as they were all blown backwards. Asha shuddered and almost dropped to her knees, not from the impact in the room, but from the sudden consumption of nearly all her remaining mana. Her vision blurred slightly as she watched four of the mages begin to get up. Again, the swell of blood coming from her wounded hand called to her - a siren song, a sure fix. An easy way out.

 _I am better than that._ she thought. 

_You are better than that._ came that dark anger within her chest, that had nothing to do with demons, and everything to do with the pain she had endured at the hands of men.

She cast a static cage.

This time she did fall to her knees, as all the mana left in her body was released in one dizzying rush. A massive purple cloud of energy blossomed in the centre of the room, and suddenly the air smelt like burnt ozone. Every hair on her arms stood on air with the power that fizzled through the room. The calm before the storm. And then it broke in a cacophony of thunder, six bursts of lightning lancing from the sphere and knocking anyone who’d attempted to stand once more prone on the ground. This time, only three of them moved to get up.

 _That should keep them occupied,_ she thought dazedly, wondering how long it would take reinforcements to come and kill her while she struggled to stand.

“Bitch!” she turned to see Alexius stood up on the dias, his shoulders sagging, the red of his robes stained to a darker, deeper crimson all along his left side as he stepped forward with all the grace of a drunk. He coughed wetly, and Asha was pleased to conclude that her blade had perhaps punctured a lung. “You think to defy me! You are a mistake! You never should’ve existed.”

Asha grinned, maniacally, “would you prefer me mounted on a wall, with a gem for an eye?”

There was already a trickle of mana returning, filling up the emptied vacuum in her chest. All she needed to do was a few moments to catch her breath, and then she’d be able to finish the job.

“What is going on here?” Fiona was watching the entire scene with wide, terrified eyes.

“Father, please! Stop this! Let’s just give up the Venatori, and go home.”

“Your father is _not_ leaving,” Asha bit out, trying and failing to get up off her knees.

“You stupid, ignorant thief! I will not let you endanger my son’s life!”

“Your life is the only one I care about,” she cried over the sound of the tempest behind her, withdrawing her staff and using it as a crutch to haul herself up to standing. She took one halting step forward, wondering if she had enough power to cast a simple flashfire. “I’m going to kill you and anyone in this place who has ever dared to lay a finger on a tranquil mage.”

“Ahh, you foolish little girl,” Alexius chuckled, though the sound was rasping, “have you made this about _you_? Your own pain? The injustice you suffered at the hands of others because you were too weak to protect yourself?”

“Pretty strong words from someone who’s sold his soul because he can’t cure his own son,” Asha retorted.

Alexius snarled as he reached for the gem at his throat, “you stupid little bitch, snapping at whatever hand comes too close. Don’t worry, little Herald. I’ll take it all away. I’ll make it so that you were never born to suffer.”

Green light not dissimilar to the anchor flared in his own cupped hands as a spell hit Asha from behind. She was forced to her knees again as she felt a web of burning cold frost encase her back. It meant she was powerless to defend herself as Alexius built up the new cloud of energy in his palms and moved to fling it in her direction.

“No!” came a new voice from her left-hand side. There was another flash, this time of yellow light, and then Alexius was stumbling, his face gaunt and pale with blood loss. The magic slipped from his control, the gem falling from his hands. But before it could it the ground, suddenly the energy exploded out around them, until green was all Asha could see.

The dusk was just beginning to darken to ink blue when Cullen left his tent to seek out a meal from the officers’ mess, set up in one of the buildings in the lower edge of Haven. It was as he reached the gates that he heard it - the pounding of hooves against the dirt track, the laboured breathing of someone gasping for air. “Commander!” came a hoarse, desperate shout.

Cullen turned to see an Inquisition scout on horseback, galloping at full tilt up to the gate and desperately trying to rein their mount to a stop in front of him. Even as the light faded, he could see the telltale signs of exhaustion on both horse and rider - the muscles in the beast’s limbs were twitching spasmodically, its dark coat covered in a lather of sweat. The scout half dismounted, half fell out of the saddle, as she ran the final few feet to him, her face a picture of panic.

“Emergency, ser!” she panted, handing him a crumpled note that was damp from rain and sweaty palms. “In the Hinterlands. The Herald-”

Cullen ripped the note open, to see a hurried, terse message in Varric’s hand. It was the fact that it was so very scrawled, with smears of ink marring the page, that clued him into the severity of the situation. It was very rare that Varric Tethras’ penmanship was anything less than exemplary.

 _Tevinter magisters in control of Redcliffe. Flash disappeared on fucked-up suicide mission. Everything gone to shit. Hurry._ The last word was triple underlined, and the need for emphasis had torn through the page slightly.

Cullen’s body went cold. “What-?”

The scout was still desperately trying to catch her breath, and it half sounded like sobs. “The Herald - she - she walked into Redcliffe Castle. Alone. No back up. It’s crawling with magisters. They’ve shut the gates. No one can get in.”

“When was this?”

“Midday, ser. I rode - as fast - as fast as I could. Need reinforcements.” 

Then it had happened a little over four hours ago. Panic gripped Cullen’s chest. There was every likelihood the Herald was already dead.

What could have possessed her to do such a thing? He would have considered the Herald reckless, but not in a way that seriously endangered her life.

He glanced around. By the gates, two of Leliana’s shadows were watching their comrade with horrified expressions, clearly having eavesdropped on the whole conversation. One of Bull’s Chargers - a dark skinned elf - was watching silently from her place in their small camp, her hand posed over where she’d previously been sharpening one of her blades. “Don’t just stand there!” he bellowed, as if that was not exactly what he’d been doing himself, “go find the Divine’s Left and Right Hands! The Herald of Andraste is in danger!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was so much fun to write!! Please let me know what you think! :)
> 
> On the subject of spirit blades, there has obviously been some artistic license employed, mostly just because spirit blades are just so fucking cool. I've decided that the hilt you have to craft (to unlock the Knight Enchanter specialisation) is what's required to keep the spell stable and the blade permanently at your beck and call, which is why the one used here flickers out of existence so quickly.
> 
> Next, we're into 'In Hushed Whispers'! Thanks for sticking with me so far!


	24. Chapter Twenty-Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'In Hushed Whispers'... but worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: violence

Asha came back to consciousness submerged up to her chest in ice cold water, coughing and spluttering. Mostly from the smell, more than anything.

“What the _fuck_ was that!” came a disgusted voice from above her, “what the fuck did you think you were doing exactly? Do you know how fucking hard it is to break into Redcliffe Castle at a moment’s notice just because you happen to see a madwoman fade-stepping through the streets?”

Of all the ways to dampen a person’s anger, dropping them in ice cold water was one of the more effective methods, if only because it led to extreme disorientation. Asha was ripped out of her murderous rage with all the ceremony of a bandage peeled back from a wound. She squinted in the darkness, and made out a tall figure dressed in snow white robes, now significantly less spotless, stood up to his knees in the water next to her. “Dorian?” she croaked.

“You’re awake, wonderful! Now tell me, am I speaking your language correctly?” Dorian’s asked angrily, “Is there some kind of issue with my accent? I’m just personally at a loss for how ‘go back to your military encampment to regroup’ got translated into ‘storm the castle on a one-woman suicide mission’.”

Asha tried to pull herself up to standing, the weight of her waterlogged clothing and the new headache pulsing in her temple making it hard. “Alexius needed to die,” she muttered.

“Oh, and that’s your decision, is it?” the other mage cast her scathing look, not even bothering to help her up, “well, it’s one you perhaps would’ve been able to make, had you actually gone away and come up with any semblance of a plan. You’re lucky I even made it in time to counterspell whatever incantation he was building. We’ve been transported to what is seemingly the basement. The man will be healed by the time we make it back to the ground floor - and now he knows all about your homicidal tendencies, it’s unlikely you’ll get another shot at him.”

Asha finally got her footing in the thick sediment coating the floor of the flooded room, and then took a quick glance around at their surroundings. “...Does Redcliffe normally have red lyrium growing out of its foundations?” she asked warily. “That seems like it would be a cause for concern.”

“I can’t say I’m familiar with Ferelden's architecture, but…” Dorian snapped his fingers, “the portal Alexius opened doesn’t necessarily displace us solely in space. In fact, it would probably be more in character for it to be-”

“-in time,” Asha finished for him. “Fuck! The magic from that pendant was the same colour as my anchor: it was probably using the same energy as the rifts, and all the rifts round here have reality bending flavour, which means…”

“It’s not a question of where he moved us, but when. My, my, my, your plan really _did_ pay off, didn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I have to confess, I was quite attached to my own personal timeline being where it was. Do you know how hard it was to find myself an optimal brand of hair wax?”

“This has to be forward in time,” Asha said, ignoring his patently obnoxious question. “From what Varric’s told me, red lyrium’s a relatively new development - at least the veins at ground level. I don’t see it just... _existing_ under the home of Ferelden nobility and no one marking it.”

“That’s my suspicion as well, if only because if we are in the past then we are, to put it mildly, colossally fucked. Alexius might be the only way for us to reverse this, and if there’s no Alexius on this continent, or no Alexius born yet, well…” Dorian cast a glance Asha’s way as she sloshed through the mucky water to reach the barred door, “I hope you’re an avid history scholar with an interest in hands-on practice.”

“Ha ha. Help me with this door, will you?”

“We’ll need to work together to escape, but don’t think this means I like you,” said the other mage as he waded over, looking vaguely disgusted the whole while, “I don’t tend to associate with would-be murderers.”

“Said the _Tevinter magister_. Whose mentor has been slaughtering defenseless mages.”

“Not a magister. And I assure you that when I knew him he only performed a blood sacrifice every _other_ weekend,” Dorian retorted archly.

Even as wrung out and drained of mana as she was, it was almost a relief when the two of them were attacked by guards. Partly, because it confirmed that the castle was still inhabited by Tevinter forces, which was somehow - in this most dire of circumstances - a good sign. But mostly because it saved her from any further snarkiness. Dorian raised an eyebrow at her when she dropped both men with an energy barrage that left her panting and dizzy, and then began dragging and rearranging them so their faces remained above the waterline, so that they wouldn’t face a depressing death in one foot of ditch water. “You’re pulling your punches _now_? Did my lecture really get through to you so quickly? Should I consider you thoroughly scolded?”

“I’m not some _axe-crazed murderer_ , Dorian. But I’m not going to apologise for trying to kill Alexius either,” she panted through gritted teeth, wondering if she was going to pass out from the exhaustion of so many big spells cast in such a small space of time, with no respite afterwards, “the man. deserves. to. die.”

“I’ll admit that he seems to be collecting every dramatic villainous cliché that my country seems to prize so dearly, but then nefarious plotting is somewhat of a national sport. Dear god woman, let me help you with that.”

Asha let out a groan of relief as her arms gave out and Dorian took the brunt of the weight of the second guard. She watched him rearrange the guard, then said, “you know what an ocularum is? How it’s _made_?”

“Oculara, you say? I’ve heard the term in theoretical discussion, but it always seemed like a lot of needlessly macabre work for relatively little gain, even for the Imperium." He looked up at her, realisation dawning across his face, "wait, you mean that Alexius-”

“Yeah.”

“And you…”

“The former tranquil?”

“Yes… I can see why that might cause some distress.”

“What is it with men and understating the obvious?” Asha sighed, remembering that first time in the war room, and Cullen’s worries over her “misgivings” regarding templars.

“In my case, it’s because living the Imperium gives you a rather thick skin for these kinds of things. The whole population would be gibbering wrecks if we took a moment for any real kind of self-reflection. Therefore, I deflect with my bad humour and dashingly roguish smiles.” 

Asha snorted unsympathetically. Guards arranged so that they wouldn't drown, the two of them left the room, and then she welded over the lock of the cell door for good measure. Then, they began the damp and unpleasant task of working their way through the flooded basement, any attempt at stealth ruined by Dorian exclaiming every time he almost lost his footing, or his hands hit something slimy on the walls. In the dark, dank underbelly of Redcliffe Castle, Asha felt her uncontrollable, murderous anger began to sputter and die, replaced with her guilt over the consequences. What if she didn’t make it back, and Alexius did just… survive? Now that the angry adrenaline-pounding heat behind her impulsive decision was starting to extinguish, she tried not to let it be replaced with panic. 

And what about that anger in the first place? She didn’t think the demons inside the oculara had been able to taint her, and was pretty certain all her decisions had been her own. She certainly knew she hadn’t used any of her own blood to do something she would truly regret. But that meant admitting that, once again, all of that murder-fuelled rage had been entirely her own.

Even worse, she truly couldn’t say that she regretted giving into it.

They finally found the stairs, and climbed out of the mire to drip their way up to the next floor of the castle. Once they dispatched the guards waiting oblivious on the next landing, Dorian found a health potion attached to one of their belts and tossed it to her.

“You best take it,” he said, “That cut on your hand… can’t have you calling down any demons. Also, it’s almost definitely infected.”

“I’m not a blood mage,” Asha said, with anger that she prayed didn’t sound defensive.

“And let’s keep it that way, hmm?”

Looking down at her arm, she saw it was now stained crimson up to the elbow. Blood had flowed down her wrist into the cuffs of her waterlogged shirt, and then blossomed across the damp fabric like ink spilt over parchment. She downed the health potion. She felt her wounds close over, but it had no effect on her headache, which seemed to be the product of an adrenaline crash, and her over-exerted willpower. She was almost tapped dry, and probably looked it, but they both knew they had press on.

They burst through heavy doors into another set of cells, a mirroring of those flooded below. Although dry here, it was just as dark, and Ashar produced a flame in her non-anchored hand to illuminate the space. 

On this level, every cell was full.

She peered into the darkness, and saw shadowed figures, watching her with eyes that glowed with blood red light. Dorian laughed nervously as the figures silently observed them from the gloom. “Nothing to see here, ladies, gentlemen, assorted monsters," he said, his voice slightly shrill, "we’ll just be on our merry way!”

“Dorian…wait.” The figures seemed vaguely human-shaped, not demonic despite their unnerving gazes. When they didn’t seem to move from their places huddled at the backs of their cells, Asha swallowed nervously, and stepped towards the closest barred door. Two steps closer, and the light of the anchor glanced of a familiar white Inquisition symbol emblazoned on the chest of the slumped figure in the cell in front of her.

“Cassandra?” she said, horrified.

The figure raised its head, responding, impossibly, to her voice. It was undeniably the Seeker who looked back at her. ““You’ve returned to us - can it be?” she stood up with clear pain, though her face was terribly hopeful, “Has Andraste given us another chance?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maker forgive me. I failed you. I failed everyone.”

“ _You_ didn’t fail anyone, my dear,” came an imperious voice from a cell on the opposite side of the room. Vivienne stepped into view, her eyes shining like rubies, full of accusation. “ _She_ did, when she recklessly abandoned us for her petty, foolish revenge.”

“...Vivienne? But... you were in Haven - you were both in Haven. What are you all-”

“You thought you’d just run off into Redcliffe’s fortress and none of us would follow?” the First Enchanter replied with pointed disdain. “The Inquisition launched a rescue for its Herald, as is to be expected. Only you were long gone, and our one weapon against the darkness disappeared with you. I don’t know how you’re here, but I hope you came with an explanation for _why_ you destroyed our every hope of survival on a whim?”

“Andraste’s sacred knickers, Flash, I can’t believe you’re alive!” another voice from another cell, as Varric stepped forward, “where were you? How did you escape?”

“Varric? I - we didn’t die or anything. We didn’t escape either. It’s just - it’s just a spell. We’ve only been in this version of Redcliffe…” she looked at Dorian, who shrugged helplessly. “Gods, an hour, at most? Alexius, he… transported us both forward in time. Through a rift that bought us here.”

“Everything that happens to you is _weird_.”

“Yeah, fucking tell me about it.” she muttered, as she began to ice over the lock on Cassandra’s cell. 

“Are you… sure that’s wise?” Dorian murmured, watching the woman on the other side and the red energy she emitted with obvious concern. Asha ignored him as the lock turned colder and colder, until it looked like it was itself made of ice. She signalled to Cassandra to push against the door, and the brittle metal exploded as the door swung outward.

“Where’s the rest of the Inquisition’s leadership? Are they in here?” she asked the Seeker as she stumbled painfully out of her cell. “If you all launched some kind of rescue… Leliana? The Commander? Are they here?”

“Leliana was taken. Only a few hours ago, I do not know where she is.” Cassandra said. “Cullen…” her expression shuttered, pain clear in her face, “he has been gone longer. The red lyrium, it does not mix well… with templars.”

That was the first time Asha felt any real guilt over this future she and Dorian could now only attempt to avert. The Commander, gone. And she knew that templars took lyrium to fuel the abilities which haunted her nightmares - what would they be like when under the influence of a perverted version of that same power source? The sense of guilt only grew as she freed more and more Inquisition members from their cells, and they started speaking of crumbling empires and demon armies that they were powerless to stop once the Herald had been lost, along with any chance of mage support.

“Hey Boss - zapping me with that spell? Pretty uncool,” grunted Bull as she began working on the lock to his cell, truly scraping the dregs of her mana to will ice into the metal. “But stabbing that Vint bastard through the chest while all his guards looked on? Pretty. Fucking. _Cool._ I saw his wounds the day we stormed the castle. Not bad, for a mage.”

“Yeah but it didn’t work though, did it?” she mumbled, as she looked on at the army of friends and barely-forged acquaintances that had come unquestioningly to her aid, following the bloody fallout of her impulsive decision. “Not in this timeline.”

“That’s why we gotta get your ass back there. Finish the job.”

The last cell they reached was Solas’. It was a relief to see her friend, even with his eyes seething with the same red of every other Redcliffe prisoner. But even though she was glad to see him live, she couldn’t help but eye him warily as he walked up to the bars to watch her work. Even now seeing how her reckless actions had played out so catastrophically, she couldn’t help but remember how he had tried to calm her emotions to stop it from happening with some deep, ingrained sense of betrayal. It still felt like a brutal violation, and with it still so fresh in her mind, she struggled to find what he’d done as anything less than unforgivable.

“You look… bad.” she said, to alleviate the silence as frost began to coat the lock.

“I am dying,” he replied matter-of-factly, “but no matter. If you can undo this, then they will all be saved. This world is an abomination, it must never come to pass.”

She snorted, “no pressure, then.”

They lapsed into silence for a few short seconds. 

“Asha - _lethallen_ \- I am truly sorry for what I did that day,” he tried to catch her eye, but Asha knew that the only way to keep her composure - when so exhausted and frightened - was to stare unyieldingly at the lock rather than look at his face. “Do not think I have not replayed that moment in my head a thousand times over. For all who may blame you for this world you find yourself in, I know that the true fault lies with me.”

“You were scared of me,” she muttered, “of what I would do. It seems you were right to be.”

“That did not give me the right to meddle with your mind in any way that you might find reminiscent of previous… atrocities. I truly regret what I did that day.”

“Good.” she said quietly, then cleared her throat against tears that - in this situation, surrounded by people she had doomed to death - felt incredibly self-indulgent. “I don’t know if I can forgive you but… weren’t you right? The madness that took over me then… it ruined everything.”

“No, it didn’t,” she could feel his gaze boring into her, and she wondered what she would see in his face if she wasn’t too cowardly to look up. “The Breach was already there, Asha. Someone, someone who made some far more foolhardy and reckless decisions than you, had ruined the world long before we discovered the oculara. Even Alexius, for all his plotting, is ruled by his emotions, not his intellect.”

By that point, the lock was caked over with ice. With an awkward cough, Bull stepped in and kicked the door, which gave way easily.

Solas stepped out, still looking at her. He seemed unable to pull his gaze away from her face, “There is no need to forgive me. If we are successful in reversing this, this branch of history will soon be obviated regardless. I can only make it so that my past self is granted the time needed to regain your trust.”

“So that’s the plan then?” Vivienne's voice was pitched loud, reminding them both of their audience for this entire conversation. “We get you and the blood mage back to the moment where your folly doomed us all, and simply hope this time things fall differently?”

"Not a blood mage," Dorian commented. Asha gave him an exasperated look, and then turned that on Vivienne, “unless you have a better idea?”

“I merely want your word, my dear, that you won’t make the same foolish decisions and get yourself killed for real this time.”

“I don’t _know_ what will happen. I’m not a seer, Vivienne,” Asha said through her teeth, “and stop calling me foolish, as if I’m a child who’s not in control of her actions." _Even though that's entirely what I feel like._ "If you’d seen those tranquil…” she sighed heavily, “if you don’t want to help me, don’t help me. But I’m under the impression that I’m you’re only chance.”

The First Enchanter glared at her, but remained silent, confirming Asha’s suspicions. Regardless of how much the other woman hated her, she clearly wanted to reverse whatever horrors had taken place in the year Asha had missed, and this was the only plan they had.

Now with eight companions at her back, Asha started making her way through the castle. It felt surreal - she’d barely made this journey an hour before, but now the castle showed a year of brutal destruction, the stone walls laced with red lyrium that pulsed like it was blood under the skin of some terrible beast. The next set of guards they came across barely lasted seconds under the wave of fire from the multitudes of Inquisition forces. When Asha’s vision doubled and she stumbled, her mana well and truly tapped, she felt something wash over her as a hand caught her from the side. Solas watched silently as the ambient magic of the veil replenished her mana in one overwhelming torrent of energy. Asha shook off his hand as soon as she was able.

“Just imagine what would’ve happened if it had been like this the first time round, dear,” Vivienne commented archly, as Asha found that she was able to regain her footing without feeling like the ground would fall away from her.

They found Leliana soon after. 

“Creators, let me get you down,” said Asha, fighting the bile that rose up her throat at the sight of the ravaged husk of the women she’d known. The only part of the Inquisition’s spymaster that was unchanged - other than her hard resilience and disturbing efficiency at murder, Asha supposed - was her hair, which remained bright and vibrant against the desiccated pallor of her face. Even her eyes were leeched of colour - it looked like a stranger who stared back at her from underneath the Nightingale’s hood as both Asha and Cassandra ran forward to undo the cuffs that held her aloft.

The grey, withered version of the Nightingale dropped from her restraints, looked at Asha as if she’d seen a ghost, and then promptly slapped her across the face.

“How dare you abandon us! What were you _thinking_? Do you know how many lives your reckless choice cost us?”

Asha held up a hand to her stinging cheek, cowering under Leliana’s deadly furious expression. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t know this would happen.”

“I defended you! When you first arrived - I said your emotions would be an asset to us, not a hindrance," she shook her head, muttering bitterly, "war is not the time for niceties - I should’ve shackled you to us when we had the chance!”

The words hit Asha like physical blows, but they did not scare her as they should’ve. She could hear the pain in Leliana’s voice, could see that something in the Nightingale’s typically sinister, watchful gaze had been warped into something even darker by the events of the past year she'd lived through. These were the words of a woman whose suffering had forged her into something sharper and unforgiving. The cold calculation of the Leliana she knew from a year ago was now replaced by the sheer ruthlessness of survival.

“It’s going to be alright, Leliana,” she replied, her words feeling inadequate even as she them, “you’re safe now.”

“Forget safe. If you came back from the dead, you need to do better than safe. You need to end this.”

“That’s the plan, actually,” commented Dorian from his cautious place at the door to Leliana’s torture chamber. 

“Dorian can reverse the spell that brought us here,” Asha said, desperately willing her friend to believe her, “we can stop it, Leliana.”

The Nightingale spared her one callous glance, “Do you have weapons?”

Asha nodded.

“Good. The magister will be in his chambers.” Leliana didn’t look at her again as she began to move towards the door. Her gait was unerringly steady for someone who was being tortured mere moments before.

“You aren’t...curious to how we got here?” Dorian asked tentatively. 

“No.” Leliana said in a cold voice, “Should I be?”

“Alexius sent us into the future - this, his victory, was never meant to be. A quirk in the fabric of time - a knot that can easily be unpicked.”

“We can fix this,” Asha said, “I promise.”

“What does it matter to me if you can escape this hell? Are you going to take me with you?” Leliana glared at them both, then gave a derisive snort when neither of them answered her question. “So long as Alexius can still bleed, nothing else matters. Maybe now I will finally understand what you did that day. I have spent my life dedicated to forces higher than me - it will be nice to give into selfishness, and know it doesn’t matter.” 

“Leliana, I-”

“Spare me your honeyed words, Herald.” she wielded the formality of the title they’d agreed to ignore like a knife, “You think you feel guilt, but you don’t, not really. This is all pretend to you. Some future you hope will never exist. But I suffered. The whole world suffered. It was real. Alexius will pay.”

“Though darkness closes, I am shielded by flame.”

The Nightingale’s parting vows somehow carried over the sounds of the devastation, as the demons began pouring through the broken doors of Redcliffe Keep. Asha could not fight the way the other woman’s words had echoed through her. Deshanna had prayed too, when she faced her end, though it was to different gods. As had Mahanon - for all those times they’d played at blasphemy together. In those last few final, desperate moments, when there were only a handful of them left alive, she’d watched, frozen, as the last members of her clan had fallen, the names of the Creators on each of their lips. 

It was happening again. And still she was useless. Still she was worthless, undeserving of others’ sacrifices.

She had already watched, wretched and dazed by their trust, as the other members of the Inquisition had somehow, impossibly, decided to follow her again. Cassandra had looked upon her like she still truly believed her proof of divine providence. Sera, in a moment of seriousness that perhaps spoke more of the horrors of past year than any other accusation hurled at her, had placed a chaste kiss on her lips before walking out of the fortress to face her doom. Even Vivienne had gone to face the encroaching horror without question. She’d wanted to scream at them all to stop. She’d wanted to tell them they were wrong to trust her. She wanted to plead to them - _why?_ What was it about her, Asha wondered, that tricked people into thinking that she was somehow worth any of their suffering or pain? Every time in her life when she'd fucked things up, it was other people who righted her wrongs, other people who bore the punishment for her incompetence, who fell in her place.

She wasn’t special. She’d only recovered from the Lavellan massacre because of a fluke of Fade magic that no one understood. Luck, not skill. Alexius had only fallen in this future because the others were able to finish the job she’d botched a year ago. If Dorian wasn’t here, she’d be even more powerless to fix the mess she’d made. And yet still, somehow, people put their faith in her. How could she convince them to _stop_?

Everything was playing out the same as it had before, in the Planasene Forest. Watching from her hiding place, as wave after wave of people fell on swords willingly to preserve what they thought she represented - the best of her people, the last of her people, the one who held the key to their salvation. She was powerless to protect those she loved, and seemingly powerless to stop them as they each sacrificed them in turn - for her, the one who was supposed to hold the power, yet who did not even act as others displayed bravery and courage and belief in her that she knew she’d never truly felt in her heart. 

She was not a leader. She was the one who cowered in the darkness, the one who could not fight to protect herself, who needed the deeds of others to shield her. Deshanna had been a leader - Deshanna had been powerful, and wise, and didn’t let reckless emotion rule her and condemn her people to nightmarish pain. Just looking at Leliana now, fighting tooth and nail, no arrow missing its mark - why was _she_ the one they were all protecting, with her magic as weak and fumbling as a child? Why did everyone think she was so important, when she was the only one who seemed incapable of acting?

Asha had known all along she was an imposter. There was nothing brave about survival. The only way you escaped from massacres such as these, such as the one that had claimed Clan Lavellan, was through cowardice. 

She watched, horrified, as Leliana reached to her quiver, found it empty, and simply... threw herself into the fray. Dorian saw something in her expression, and placed a hand around her wrist, tugging her towards him. “You move," he said through gritted teeth, sweat on his brow, "and we all die.”

Asha knew he was right. Emotion had clouded her judgement before. She willed herself not to feel.

She didn’t succeed. Asha was unable to tear her eyes away when the Nightingale first stumbled, and then was captured by one of the maskless warriors who besieged them. She forced herself to watch.

Two years ago - three, in this future - when the templars had claimed her home, every loss and sacrifice had been rendered pointless, by _her_. When there was no one but Asha left, she’d been unable to move, unable to act. She’d been limp as a ragdoll when they had dragged her out from her hiding place by her hair, and thrown her down among the bodies of her fallen family. Now though, maybe this could all still mean something. Maybe she could still prove herself worthy of this new group who were willing to lay down their lives to save her.

But it felt once more like cheating, when the rift opened and ripped them away, at the same moment a terror demon ripped Leliana in half.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What a chonk of a chapter! You know, I almost sent Asha into this alone, but then I realised I would be depriving everyone, myself included, of good good Dorian content, so I let him join her for the ride.
> 
> I hope everyone likes my version of 'In Hushed Whispers', which doesn't deviate all that much from the original but does have some newfound significance for Asha in terms of her character. Obviously, watching all your friends die has new meaning when you've already watched everyone you loved die once - please be warned that the next chapters are going to be pretty angsty, though I will try and break it up a little with some happier moments.
> 
> On a light-hearted note, I also had fun demonstrating that Asha is actually quite clever in this chapter! She's not academic like Solas or Dorian (or Vivienne), but she can certainly make some of the jumps in logic that she makes without issue. I'm having a lot of fun writing a Dalish mage prodigy who has no booklearning but is still a badass :) I've also added chapter summaries to each chapter because I realised that those are actually helpful, although I think they might get less and less helpful the further through I get...
> 
> Thanks for sticking with me guys, see you in next week's update! So excited to put my traumatised Inquisitor up against an army of Red Templars!


	25. Chapter Twenty-Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha and Dorian make their way back to present-day Redcliffe.

Time dislodged and snapped back into place. The rift spat them both out and Asha fell to her knees, in a room that was so familiar, yet so different from the one she’d been in moments before. 

She looked around as the energy from the rift dissipated, to see everything had returned to seemingly the moment when Alexius had started his spell. He looked upon her return with abject horror and stumbled backward on unsteady legs, clearly convinced his casting hadn’t worked. Blood still poured down his side from the stab wounds she’d inflicted. She wondered if she looked completely unchanged from the ordeal they’d suffered in the future. Maybe she even looked a little better - the future had more health potions in it than this room, after all. Realising scant seconds had passed, she fought a wave of disorientation: she’d only been in the future for two hours at most, and that it was nothing in comparison to those who had lived it, but the horrors she’d witnessed made it feel like another lifetime had passed. 

“Come, Alexius, you’ll have to do better than that,” came an arch voice from behind her, confirming that Dorian had also returned alongside her. Despite his bravado, she could swear that his voice shook with relief.

But although one threat was neutralised, returning to the present did not solve any of the problems that they’d both promised the future Leliana they would fix. They'd been thrown back to a moment mid-battle. Asha had a bare breath to get her bearings before she had to desperately fling up another barrier to combat another barrage of energy from the six magister guards in the room - or rather, the three left standing after her brief disappearance from the fabric of reality had caused her static cage to drop.

That was still four mages, if you included Alexius. And Asha was exhausted after fighting him at full power twice, in two different timelines. Dorian would be tapped of mana after the struggle to craft the portal back to the present - he would be unable to offer her much help at all.

As if confirming her fears, the doors at the back of the room burst open, and five more masked magisters rushed in to their leader’s aid. Asha knew, with disgust at her own foolishness, that she would not be able to fight them off. It seemed that their bid to get back to the present, and everything people had done to assure it, was going to prove to be utterly useless. 

Then there was a bark of arcane language from behind her, shaking her from her guilt, and suddenly all of the incoming mages froze, locked up in place by pulsing cages of energy. Asha cast a startled glance behind her and saw the figure of Grand Enchanter Fiona, hand outstretched, with a face like thunder and mana coming off her in tangible waves. She’d forgotten the leader of the Rebel Mages was even in the room.

“You dare defy me, Fiona, after you have sworn yourself into our service?” Alexius’ spat, but his voice was weak, and blood shadowed the corner of his lips.

“I am not a dog, that would thoughtlessly cower under its master’s hand even as it strikes to kill,” Fiona spat back. Spirit energy pulsed around the five new combatants, and then when the Enchanter crushed her fist as if to emphasise her point, they all wordlessly fell to the floor like sacks of flour. Asha couldn’t tell if they were dead or alive. 

“Well, don’t just stand there, Herald,” the woman remarked, glancing down briefly to where Asha still knelt on the ground. And then Fiona turned, and summoned a stone fist that slammed into the back of Alexius’ head with a hollow sounding thump. Felix let out a cry as his father crumpled limply in his arms.

Asha, shaken by the sudden presence of her newly acquired ally, hastily cast another set of fire mines under the feet of the three remaining mages. She triggered them in the same breath and watched as all three were flung through the air. As one of them was thrown up against the back wall with a sick crunch, another wave of magisters poured in through the doors. This time, there were ten of them.

“I believe that the Inquisition is still in need of mages to close the Breach, yes?” said the Grand Enchanter through gritted teeth, as her hands began weaving the pattern of a new spell, “you help my followers and I get out of here alive, and I will gladly serve you in this capacity.”

And then the Grand Enchanter released a mana clash, in a wave of blinding energy that caused every single newcomer in the room to drop prone. Only half were able to raise their heads off the floor after the shockwave dissipated. Asha stared back the Enchanter in mute awe. Her breathing was not even laboured.

The army the Inquisition was able to send to Redcliffe was determined precisely by how many horses Haven currently held. Fifty men - fifty-six, if you counted those with their own personal mounts, such as Lady Vivienne - rode out before dawn the morning after they received note of the Herald’s capture, with the aim of reaching Redcliffe by the afternoon, if they rode hard. It was a paltry number, but it was all the incipient Inquisition had to address a crisis at such short notice. Messengers had been deployed in the night with instructions for Leliana’s scouts, including a map of the tunnels under the fortress which the Nightingale had drafted from memory. There were hopes that reconnaissance would help them ascertain the number of magisters currently within Redcliffe, so that they had some idea of what they were dealing with behind the Keep's walls. 

Clearly impatient at what the small amount of bureaucracy the organisation's crisis response required, Bull’s Chargers had also ridden off eastwards in the dead of night, without the Inquisition’s official permission. Everyone knew that if they hoped to reach the Herald in Redcliffe, they needed a military presence to break into the fortress, and they needed it now. If she was even still alive.

Cassandra and Cullen rode among the troops dispatched into the Hinterlands. Neither had slept more than a scant few hours in the night, which had been full of frantic logistics as they tried to muster an army at a moment’s notice, and tried to work out how precisely to lay siege to a Bann’s fortress without declaring war on the Bann himself. Fear gripped at Cullen’s heart, and he saw the same terror written plain in the face of his friend. Even if the Tevinter presence in Redcliffe had nothing to do with the Breach - something which he highly doubted - Asha was an elf, and the anchor was clearly something of great magical power. Both of these things alone meant that she was in extreme danger, if she resided in what was now a Tevinter stronghold.

The Inquisition rode to their Herald’s rescue with determined desperation. It was mid-afternoon when they made it to the edge of the Hinterlands basin, only to be met by one of the Nightingale’s scouts, who hailed them down from the side of the road.  
Incongruously, they were smiling, eyes shining, as Cullen drew his mount to a stop alongside them.

“We sent a raven, but figured it wouldn’t get to you in time!” they said, pushing long hair out of their face as they craned their neck to speak with him. “The Herald - she’s safe! So are the Rebel Mages!”

“I… what?” asked Cullen, articulately. The whole journey here, he’d genuinely been trying to make peace with the idea that the Herald might be gone, doing no small amount of recalibrating to their plans for handling the Breach.

The Scout was grinning, practically vibrating with excitement. “She single-handedly broke into the Redcliffe Keep, then seven hours later... she broke out again! Captured their leader, took out every magister that stood in her way - that way round, apparently. They’re all holed up in the Redcliffe tavern, her and her companions and the Grand Enchanter.”

Which meant that everyone, including the Grand Enchanter, was also _alive_. Cullen's mind flashed back to the harried woman who’d been unable to cast a barrier during their altercation with demons in the valley. He shared a confused glance with Cass, who shrugged her shoulders almost helplessly, as if she was also struggling to equate the two. After a moment's stunned silence, he simply directed their men onwards. What other orders could they give, even with this new information? 

Riding through Redcliffe’s now wide open gates, he saw that the majority of the village seemed populated by people in robes, both Circle and apostate, each with a flash of red on either their arms or upper torso - a signal of their belonging to the Rebellion. That, if nothing else, confirmed the scout’s report: it seemed that the mages were no longer locked up, or at the cruel mercy of Tevinter magisters. They milled around the open space, and a huge group of them were concentrated outside The Gull and Lantern, whispering amongst themselves as they watched the Inquisition’s approach. Cullen recognised this gathering as the same phenomenon that had gripped Haven after the Breach had been sealed - as he directed the rest of his troops onward to the Crossroads camp and dismounted outside the tavern, he heard the words ‘Herald’, ‘tranquil’ and ‘Inquisition’ whispered reverently amongst the townspeople. 

At a glance, Cullen also recognised several members of the Chargers guarding The Gull and Lantern’s porch, though they similarly looked at a loss, now their assistance was seemingly no longer needed. They were simply acting as crowd control, keeping the mass of reverent bystanders from making it to the doors. Solas also stood outside the Gull's entrance, watching the growing crowds with an impassive expression, as if he was deep in thought. The mage’s face did however light up in recognition when he saw Cassandra, Vivienne, and Cullen approach, mounting the steps. “You made it in good time,” he remarked off-handedly, “it’s heartening to know that Bull’s men wouldn’t have been _completely_ obliterated, had they lived up to their name and charged in after the Herald. Had she even needed rescuing.”

“Where is she?” Cassandra asked, though the question on Cullen’s mind was ‘why aren’t you with her’. The mage was hardly built to be manning the door, and he’d rarely seen the man not to be in the Herald’s company.

“She’s resting upstairs,” Solas replied, gesturing to the door, though he made no move to guide them through, “she’s slept most of the time since escaping the Keep this morning.”

“What happened?” Cass demanded, clearly not in the mood for small talk. But before her interrogation could continue, another voice interjected.

“Ah, has our daring rescue, and our darling rescuers, finally been launched at us?” came a delighted cry from inside the tavern. The door swung up to reveal a strange man Cullen didn’t recognise who, at first glance, had definitely seen better days. His extravagant clothing was stained with blood and dirt, his skin was sallow with exhaustion, and he had deep, bruise-like shadows under his eyes, smudged kohl that seemed days old patching his lids and leaving grey shadows on his cheeks. The man met Cullen's scrutiny with his own, folding his arms across his chest as he surveyed them all, “My my, you all look so very pleasant, when you’re not poisoned by red lyrium! Would you like me to swoon, perhaps, so that you lovely people don’t feel quite so useless?”

Solas rolled his eyes, “this is Dorian of House Pavus, a native of Tevinter, and our new ally-”

“-and the reason your charming Herald isn’t your charming _late_ Herald, in manifold senses of the word,” the other man, Dorian, completed the sentence with an exhausted but still undeniably self-satisfied grin. “Tell me, does she tend to lay waste to entire armies whenever you set her loose? Seems to me that that would be awfully hard to keep track of, really. Should we give her a bell or something?”

Another helpless look passed between Cassandra and Cullen. “What _happened_?” Cassandra repeated, this time with more urgency.

Solas sighed, “after meeting with Master Pavus to discuss the magical anomalies regarding the rifts in the area, we discovered something in Redcliffe that caused Asha great distress. It seems that the Venatori -”

“-That’s the cult of bloodmages you somehow didn’t notice sitting right on your doorstep,” Dorian supplied helpfully.

“-have been using the skulls of former tranquil mages as tools to further their goals in regards to the Breach and some kind of ‘Elder One’,” continued Solas seamlessly, as if Dorian interrupting his sentences had already become an accepted routine. “As you can imagine, Asha was deeply upset by this. She resolved to attack and kill the Venatori’s leader-”

“-without any back-up, I might add.”

“-and went back into Redcliffe Castle. Regretfully, we were not quick enough to stop her, and she made it into the Keep.”

"Well, _you_ weren't quick enough," Dorian said, dismissively. 

“And that’s where shit gets _weird_ , Seeker,” interrupted Varric, opening the door to the Gull and Lantern.“Are you guys just going to stand out there? When there’s perfectly good alcohol in here to help you swallow all this arcane bullshit?”

“Asha should not be disturbed,” Solas interjected solemnly. Cullen did not miss the meaningful look that passed between Dorian and Varric.

“Yes well, I can take it from here,” Dorian said, clapping the elf on the shoulder, “if you’re still insisting on avoiding her?”

Solas glared, but didn’t actually argue. To Cullen's surprise, they left him standing outside, as Dorian ushered them all through the door and began the tale with renewed vigor, “Well, you see, then our darling heroine bursts into the chambers of the Venatori leader - my former mentor, Gereon Alexius - and somehow gets close enough to skewer him through the chest with a spirit blade-”

“The Herald is a _knight enchanter_?” Vivienne, at the back of their group, sounded vaguely scandalised by the idea.

“Yes, one who attempted to commit a cold-blooded murder, which I rather feel should be the focus of your attention,” Dorian gestured to one of the tables in the otherwise empty tavern, ushering them to sit. “But the blow, alas, was not fatal, and this is when I launch a daring rescue of my own, because she is - quite frankly - fucked. Alexius, it seems, has more power at his disposal than he used to. I launch a counterspell - a truly beautiful piece of casting, honestly, frankly miraculous given the time I was given to improvise - and that combines with the spell he was brewing, which catapults us forward in time…”

Cullen sat, silently bemused, as Dorian recounted what he claimed had taken place in the future version of Redcliffe. He watched Varric's expression grow stormy at the mentions of red lyrium _growing into_ people, and Cassandra's expression become thunderous as the mage documented the destruction of the Inquisition, all its key players lying trapped under the keep while the world ended above them. It was certainly a lot to take in.

“And then," Dorian continued, barely pausing for breath, "we make it back to the present - back to the exact moment where Asha was totally, royally fucked, of course. Our heroine - and our dashing hero - are exhausted, drained dry! All seemed lost! But then the Grand Enchanter valiantly stepped up to the plate and decided that perhaps blindly selling her people into slavery hadn’t been the _best_ of plans, and started battling the Venatori with us. Six hours, three floors, several hundred freed mages, and sixty-two magisters later, we see daylight again. Your girl is a _trooper_. Such manners. You know, she only fainted once we’d made it back here, to a nice feather bed.”

“The Herald fought... sixty magisters?” Cullen said disbelievingly. When you considered the number of templars that were sent out to chase down individual apostates… even the Hero of Ferelden had only faced around fifteen actual blood mages, when she stormed Kinloch Hold, and Cullen knew firsthand the devastation they had wrought on the Circle. The only person with a comparable record was Hawke, and she’d lived in _Kirkwall_ , which rather skewed a person’s relative scale for most things that were awful and blood magic related.

“Well, sixty mages of the Imperium, all minted and seen as qualified enough to die for their cause. And it must be said that she defeated them with my and the Grand Enchanter’s help. And the help of a good few of your southern mages in the end. With four strategic mana recuperations in barricaded store rooms, and one in what I believe was the late Arl’s bedroom? Still, I would not particularly recommend it. It’s certainly not an experience I’ll seek to repeat in a hurry.”

“And this Magister - Alexius?” Cassandra asked.

“Well, he’s-”

“-not dead,” came a tired, weak voice from the foot of the stairs. Heads turned to see Asha leaning heavily against the banister, her face as pale as Dorian’s, with the same deep blue bruises under her eyes. Now that Cullen had context, the signs of mana exhaustion were clear in both of them. Her shirt was filthy with dirt and sweat, and there was also a strange tidemark round the hem, like she’d been wading in a sewer. She walked forward on tentative, unsteady feet, as if her joints were paining her. It was a familiar sight to Cullen, who felt a twinge of sympathy. The symptoms of mana drain were... well, pretty similar to those of lyrium withdrawal, as the body desperately tried to cope with the depletion of its mana stores, either natural or artificially cultivated.

“You gossiping about me?” the Herald asked, with a quirk of her lips that vaguely imitated a smile but did not reach her shadowed eyes, and a bravado everyone could tell she didn’t really feel.

“Asha!” Casssandra bolted out of her chair and Asha blinked owlishly with vague alarm as the Seeker raced over to hug her, a small smile creeping onto her face after the wince at initial contact. She spared a quick glance at Cullen, as if she was somehow worried he would also try to greet her with a similar display of emotion, but he just stayed where he was, even as an unspeakable relief washed over him. He gave her a small nod, and tried not to cringe at the inadequacy of the gesture.

“Good to see you, Cass,” Asha said, running a hand through matted hair and detaching herself awkwardly, before dragging herself over to the table where they all sat and collapsing into a chair with all the elegance of a puppet with its strings cut loose. “Fiona knocked Alexius out when she pledged to fight with me and get us out of Redcliffe. He’s still unconscious, recovering after I… you know, stabbed him. But he’s stable.”

“That’s… quite the change of heart,” Cullen observed. “If you did indeed stab him, I mean.”

“Please don’t misunderstand me, Alexius _needs to die_ ,” something sinister flashed in the Herald’s eyes, her hands tightening where they gripped the table for support. “It’s just that certain people,” (Dorian pointedly cleared his throat), “have pointed out that it might not be within my personal jurisdiction to make the killing blow. As much as I want that man dead, me killing him in a fit of rage doesn't really play out all that well. Dorian told you we went to the future, right?”

Both Cullen and Cassandra nodded, wide eyed.

“I saw what my actions did there,” Her gaze was pinned to the table in front of her, and her expression was stormy, a mixture of anger and something else, akin to self-loathing. “There’s more than enough evidence for any court of law to sentence him to death. I’ve killed enough people in the last two days, I don’t need another added to the tally. Besides - we need to find out as much as we can about the Elder One.”

With that solemn statement, the conversation moved onto a dryer discussion of what this all meant, logistically, for the Inquisition. They had a glimpse of the wider picture that lay behind the Conclave explosion. It also seemed as if the race to Redcliffe with fifty men wasn’t a completely wasted trip: their mustered forces would now simply be acting as an escort to get a cavalcade of Rebel Mages safely into Haven, through a worn-torn countryside still filled with pockets of soldiers who hated them. The Herald’s actions, while an almost impossible feat in and of themselves, had also won their cause an army.

“I cannot believe that the Rebels would ally with a Tevinter magister!” Cassandra groused, “blood mages! The mages are more volatile than we anticipated. We must take measures to keep them under our control, when we bring them back to Haven.”

Asha gave her friend a sharp look. “We’re not going to do anything to _control_ them, Cassandra. It’s not like we’ve conscripted them to help us with the Breach. That’s exactly what Alexius wanted to do - throw them into danger without letting them have any say in their own fates.”

“I had hoped the Inquisition was better than that, yes?” Dorian murmured, casting a sidelong glance to Asha, as if he genuinely trusted her.

“Regardless of what decisions she made when she was desperate, when it mattered, Fiona came over to our side willingly,” Asha said, raking her hands through her hair, “we came to an agreement and we fought alongside each other. I didn’t have to order her to risk her life for us - I must honour that. And I’ll be honest, I owe her my life. She carried us through that last battle - I wouldn’t be alive without her help.”

“But they cannot be trusted!” Cass replied.

“Trusted to what, have free will? They're just _people_. They helped me escape Redcliffe, and as thanks we should what - imprison them? Enslave them?” The Herald’s already tired voice became obviously frustrated. “This isn’t the Circle, Cass.”

“It could be,” came Vivienne’s cool interjection. “Although your definitions are a little off, my dear - I'm confused as to what you think the Circle actually is. We could certainly stand to tip the balances a little more in our favour. If they were desperate enough to whore themselves to the Imperium, they would accept whatever terms we gave them.”

“What? No! That’s exactly what Alexius did - treat them like shit just because they have nowhere else to turn!”

“Forgive me, Lady Vivienne, but it would be unwise to anger them needlessly,” interjected Cullen, to the surprise of all. He shifted in his seat, studiously avoided Asha’s confused look, and continued, “regardless of what promises Asha has made, and whether such a decision would compromise them, it’s frankly impractical. This magister enslaved them, and he was deposed within _hours_. These people are our only option at a stable alliance, and have been ever since we ruled out the Order. We are just as desperate for their cooperation as they are for ours. With our options so limited, we want to keep them on-side, and fully bought into the Inquisition's cause. If the Grand Enchanter was willing to risk her life protecting Asha for the promise of freedom, we should foster that good faith.”

The Rebel Mages were a sizeable force, and he’d seen the way they clustered around the site of the recovering Herald, as if waiting for a glimpse of their saviour. He supposed Asha couldn’t fall out of any more holes in the sky, but she was at least finding new and novel ways to get people invested in the Inquisition.

“ _You’re_ saying we shouldn’t imprison them?” predictably, Asha sounded incredulous.

“What? Would you prefer me to change my mind and antagonise you needlessly, after the day you've had?” Cullen replied, with weighted civility. “If we’re to surround ourselves with hundreds of mages, I’d really rather they didn’t hate us. I _did_ live in Kirkwall, you know.”

“Not sure that’s a point in your favour, Curly.” said Varric, lifting his eyes up from the cup he’d been very quietly studying.

“This wasn't even up for debate in the first place!” Asha ground out, frustration and exhaustion clear in the taut lines of her body. “Fiona helped us fight our way free on the promise of an alliance, not a conscription!”

Cullen hadn't been about to argue, but he was pleased to see that both Cass and Lady Vivienne were now also silenced. As they began to discuss strategy, Cullen kept his opinions to minimum. He wanted this wrapped up quickly - preferably before the Herald passed out on the wooden table. Everything about her posture was pained, and he knew from experience that she probably wasn’t listening to half the circular arguments being pushed around the table. What was done was done. Asha had made her deal with the Grand Enchanter, and gotten them a battalion of mages. He was certain they all could work with that - just two hours ago, he’d been trying to work out how precisely the Inquisition could even function if she was dead and they no longer had an anchor to keep the situation under control.

Once they brought the meeting to a close, with plans to mobilise the mages and get them back to Haven the next morning, Asha actually froze, as if she’d just remembered something. Somehow, she became even paler.

“Cass, Comm- Cullen, I need to talk with you,” she said, as the others dispersed.

The two of them shared another confused look, and moved off with the Herald to a corner of the empty tavern. Asha was quiet, avoiding their gaze and hugging her shoulders like she was trying to shrink inwards. Her brow was knotted, and she didn’t speak.

“Herald?” Cullen prompted, once the silence had drawn on too long.

“Not the Herald.” she replied almost on instinct, and then pinched the bridge of her nose as if she had a headache.

“...My apologies.”

“I just -” she huffed. “Fuck. Sorry. Give me a second.”

They did.

“It’s just - you guys - you both - ugh! You can... Silence, right?”

The words came out in a hurried rush, like she was forcing herself through them, and Cullen supposed she probably was. Silencing was unlikely to be topic that she relished. The question itself, frankly, caused the both of them distress. He cast a helpless glance at Cassandra, pleading for her to answer for them both. The Seeker was the only one who knew that he was not taking lyrium, and the brutal fact was that he didn’t think he could cast Silence without it.

“We can, yes,” the Seeker lied easily on his behalf, or perhaps just conjectured with more confidence than he dared to.

“Ok," Asha said, more to herself, "ok. Did - did someone tell you about what we found? Down by the docks? Before all this... happened.”

“As in, the building that…”

“...that made me tear off like a mad woman to go find Alexius?" Pain was written clear across Asha's face. "Yep! That one.”

“Solas explained it to us, briefly,” Cullen replied.

“I, well…” Asha worried at her lip, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. She closed her eyes for second, before continuing, “I heard... voices there. Only I could hear them, and that includes Solas. And. Well. I realised... they were demons. Demon voices. No one else exactly... knows, but... but that building is full of demons, trapped in tranquil skulls, and I think they tried to possess me, so you should go and Silence them or purge them or cleanse them or whatever it is you templars are trained to do.”

The torrent of words ended, and the two warriors could see the Herald was trembling. Cullen wondered if she knew that, when a mage started hearing demons, the one a templar was sent after was typically the mage.

Cass was the first to rally, her mouth a hard line even as she tried to soften her voice, “so, there are demons… trapped in the-”

“The oculara,” Asha said. “Yes. And they spoke to me. They tried to get me to set them free. And - and -" she let out another shuddering breath, wringing her hands, "I don’t think they got to me. I was already so angry, and all those people were just _dead_ , and I am pretty powerful. I didn't care about coming out alive, that's different than before, and I already knew how to summon a spirit blade, I just hadn’t tried to yet, since coming back. But - I - but-”

“You’re worried you’ve been possessed,” Cullen finished for her, cutting another frantic speech short. He thought back to the idea of her somehow having fought down sixty magisters, and realised with absolute clarity that that must be _precisely_ what she feared. He knew she'd been training a lot of late, but that seemed like an escalation of her power, even so. But then he said it aloud, and Asha looked at him with wild eyes, the air around them beginning to crackle with terrified energy, and he realised that he was literally the worst person who could've said those words to her. If there was one thing she feared more than thinking she was possessed, it was probably the idea of _him_ thinking the same thing.

Which made him wonder, exactly why had they - why had _he_ \- been among the first people she chose to tell?

“Now, now, darling girl,” suddenly Dorian sidled up next to her, seemingly appearing from nothing. His sudden entrance diffused the growing tension, and the magical energy left the air, a product of Asha's confusion if nothing else. The man put his hand on the Herald's shoulder and - Cullen couldn’t help but notice - protectively angled his body between her and them. He must’ve been waiting in the wings while they were absorbed in their conversation, and felt the change in the atmosphere that heralded something messy. The mage continued, casually, despite his premeditated actions, “I happen to be well acquainted with many blood mages, and quite frankly you are far too bedraggled, exhausted, and frightful-looking in this moment to be considered among their number. You wouldn’t look like you need a week long bath in lyrium, if you had a demon powering you.”

Asha looke at the other mage with wide eyes. “But - but I-”

“Trust me dear. The way you look right now, you couldn’t pay my country to take you in.”

“But they - I could hear them talking to me, and I- I- I got so _mad_ and I was so _stupid_ , and then I-”

"You're not possessed, Asha," Dorian told her firmly.

Asha blinked at him a few times, as if willing herself to believe him. Then suddenly, to everyone's horror, she burst into tears. Huge, racking sobs, like an abandoned child.

Dorian recovered the quickest out of the three of them. “There, there,” he sighed, and then he enveloped the Herald in a hug, patting her back as she wept into his shoulder. “ _Finally._ I thought it was going to take a whole week for the shock to wear off. You did travel to the future and back and _then_ fight off half of Tevinter, you know. You’re allowed to have a little cry.”

For some reason, that made Asha wail harder. The man cast a look over his shoulder at the two warriors, seemingly unconcerned by such a turn in events. “Well, you heard our glorious saviour! Go take care of those monstrosities down by the docks. There’s no one possessed here, unless demons are often inclined to get their snot all over my nice clothes.”

“These clothes smell like a sewer,” came a wet-sounding mumble from the Herald.

“Hush, you.” chided Dorian, and Cullen found himself completely unsurprised that, despite this man only knowing Asha for what must’ve been a day at most, there was obvious affection in his voice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, what do you think - both of the plot AND the characterisation in this chapter? I love to hear feedback.
> 
> The resolution of Redcliffe is a bit of a Fiona-ex-machina, perhaps, but at the same time she's literally the Grand Enchanter!!?! I figured that the head of the Rebel Mages must be crazy powerful, and I actually *wanted* to use her in the plot, rather than just... leaving her in the sidelines like the game does? ¬_¬ The spells she uses in the first section are mass paralysis and mana clash, two of my favourite spells from Origins!
> 
> The next chapter is back to Asha's POV. Hopefully some of her shake-y characterisation over these last few chapters will make a bit more sense...!


	26. Chapter Twenty-Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of Redcliffe, Asha closes the Breach.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: mental health, alcohol

Asha spent the week after Redcliffe feeling like steaming, freshly shovelled, _shit_.

The fight to escape from the Keep had been a tooth and nail affair, even with Fiona’s vast amounts of power on their side. Asha had known what it felt like to be pretty tapped out, but had never been able to fathom what it might feel like to not have any mana exist in your body at all. It was one of those dumb thought exercises Deshanna had sometimes made her do when she meditated, imagining that she wasn’t a mage in the first place. She thought her ordeal at Redcliffe might have given her some idea as to the answer. At points, she’d been so drained that an arcane bolt - an arcane bolt! Like she was a child playing at magecraft! - had been all that decided the skirmishes between her and whatever faceless Venatori she’d found herself trapped with in that endless labyrinthine maze of corridors. Part of what had taken them so long to claw their way out of the castle was the long periods that had been spent hunkered down behind cover. Asha had crouched behind furniture and pressed herself against walls, desperately willing her mana to return, with some poor fuck at the opposite end of the corridor stuck behind their own barrier of cover doing the exact same thing.

She’d never known exhaustion like this.

The travel back to Haven had been a blur. Asha insisted on riding back on Buttons, but had at one point been jolted awake by a sudden rocking motion to find her mouth full of horse hair, having slumped down asleep into the mare's mane. She was surprised to find the Commander on her left holding the reins, leading her mount steadily alongside his own while she’d remained passed out in the saddle, with his eyes trained impassively onto the horizon. When she'd struggled upright, he’d handed them back to her without comment.

She hadn’t spoken to the Commander since she’d voiced her fears about the voices in the oculara room, and what precisely they meant. It had taken all her courage to admit what might have taken place there, but the fact that there were seemingly no repercussions to her confession was almost… disconcerting. Disappointing? She wanted someone to punish her for the mistakes she’d made in Redcliffe, but everyone was treating it like a straightforward victory. When she trailed Cass into the Chantry, Leliana had smiled at her approach and Josephine had enveloped her in an unexpected hug, exclaiming that she was only happy to see her safe. Even Dorian, who had been there with her, who had witnessed all her friends _die_ for her, had been full of praises in their debrief, in which Asha recounted moments she never wanted to relive again for the fourth time.

Although it was a fear all mages held in their hearts, she supposed that she had known, deep down, that no demon pact had been made that day, regardless of what came after. She still felt too much like herself, and had heard no more voices down in the bellies of Redcliffe Castle, when ‘desperate’ didn’t quite cover what exactly it was she had been feeling. But how else had she made it out of that place alive? There had to be an explanation. It wasn’t like she was special.

It wasn’t like she deserved to be here.

Her dreams were red, but whether it was with red lyrium or blood, she could no longer tell. Events at Redcliffe blurred into Clan Lavellan’s demise in her mind. Maybe that was her punishment. She thought it was a unique kind of cruelty, to only want to sleep, and then fear what would happen when you did.

One day blurred into the next. She slept, she ate food, she played a lot of card games with Varric and nearly lost them all. Around her, Haven’s population shifted to accommodate the mages, and the Inquisition began planning their second attempt to seal the Breach. The only time she was roused into something vaguely resembling urgency was when she was walking past Leliana’s tent and heard the woman discussing the planned execution of a traitorous scout with one of her spies. The Nightingale’s tone of voice sounded so like the Leliana of the future, who had seen herself so much like a tool to be wielded that she’d given up her life without a thought. Asha had barged in, demanded for Butler to be kept alive, and then left. She’d spent the evening lying in her bed, staring blankly at the ceiling, doubting her decision. What right had she to dictate Leliana’s leadership decisions?

The next thing she knew she was standing next to Solas in the ruins of the Temple of Sacred Ashes, staring up at the partially closed rift, that leaked light like a half-closed wound. Preparations had happened without her input, as she’d refused to attend the last three meetings, feigning headaches or exhaustion. As promised, she was just there to ‘wave her hand where it was needed’. As the rebel mages - allies that _she_ had won for their cause - assembled around the half ruined balconies, she felt nothing. She just looked at the strange light that pulsed above her. _It’s probably going to knock me on my ass again,_ she thought, remembering the last time she’d tried to close the Breach, and the two days of unconsciousness that followed.

Solas cleared his throat at her side, causing her to startle somewhat from where she’d just been staring blankly into the middle distance. She turned to find him watching her, and she was careful to arrange her face so that she looked somewhat unconcerned. This version of Solas hadn’t spoken to her since he’d tried to ensnare her in the peaceful aura during her fit of rage. This version had watched silently when she’d stumbled out from Redcliffe Keep as the portcullis was raised, muttered some semi-coherent sentences and gestured to the existence of Grand Enchanter Fiona, and then limped out into the night air to escape what horrors had taken place within those walls. She hadn’t meditated with him since their return to Haven - she’d never been awake early enough, and it wasn’t like she could do any magic practice, not right now. Her mana was back to normal, but for some reason whenever she thought of picking up her staff lethargy just washed over her.

“ _When_ this is successful,” he said, low enough for just her to hear. “There will be a celebration, back in Haven.”

She noticed the way he had placed emphasis on the certainty in his words. But he hadn’t seen the future. He didn’t know what could happen if they fucked this up, even a little bit.

“Uh-huh,” she replied, hugging her arms around her torso.

“You should join them,” he told her gently, “you did all of the work getting us here. This is your moment of triumph.”

“Right,” she let out a mirthless laugh, and then tried to rein it in a little. The one thing they didn’t need was a bitchy Herald, even one who had a headache and honestly just wanted to be lying in bed. This moment meant something to the other people around them, and she shouldn’t cheapen that. “What if it just, you know? Doesn’t work? Or removes the anchor?”

It was meant more as a cheap trick of deflection, to stop Solas from prying too much into why she was tired and cranky. At the moment, she didn’t even really fear tranquility - so much horror in the last week, she figured she was just numb to feeling any more. It was slightly too successful though, as something in his eyes softened, and he dared to move a step closer. “I do not think the closing of the Breach will affect the anchor, or at least not its effect on your magic and your consciousness,” he told her, with something akin to confidence. “At this point, you’ve been directly connected to the Fade for over two months. It is likely woven into you now, your very being. I doubt that tranquility would be able to take root in you again.”

“Tell that to my tranquil brand,” Asha replied without thinking, and then immediately regretted it. Baiting Solas with arcane lore was asking for trouble. 

His eyes took on that sharpness he got when a new problem presented itself. Like she was a puzzle for him to study. “Why? How does it react to the anchor? To the fade rifts?”

“Yeah, no. We’re _not_ discussing that.”

“Ahh, of course. My apologies.” He didn’t quite look crestfallen, but he pulled back slightly. Asha knew deep down she was being unfair, given that he was only trying to reassure her, and she was the one that had bought it up. Still, she made no move to apologise: she wouldn’t be discussing it with him, or anybody, and if her tiredness hadn’t left her so unguarded, she wouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place.

“Even so, Asha,” he said quietly. “I do not think you should fear this particular outcome. You have done well to get us here. Few could have done what you have done. You should celebrate your victories when they come, and have hope.”

Asha lowkey wanted to punch him in his stupid, solemn, sincere face. “Let’s just get this over with,” she replied tiredly, and then moved away before he could make any more motivational speeches. 

The journey could only have one legitimate destination without looking like she was fleeing, so she took her place beside Cass. “The Grand Enchanter is in position,” the Seeker told her, gesturing to the balcony where Fiona stood, along with Leliana and Cullen, who were both watching the scene with extreme tension in every line of their bodies. Asha supposed that when the whole reason you’d built an organisation was about to be put to the test, she’d be feeling a little tense too. 

“She is greatly impressed with your magic, you know,” Cassandra confided, “she has offered to find you a trainer to help you relearn the disciplines of the Knight Enchanter, if you are interested.”

Asha’s heart spasmed a little in her chest. Her only teacher had been Deshanna.

“Maybe." she replied flatly, "what the fuck’s a Knight Enchanter?” Cassandra gave her a confused look, but didn’t have enough time to ask any questions before Solas informed them it was time to start.

“So I just… activate the rift like last time?” she asked. She knew it was bad she had to ask, but she didn’t remember much from the briefing held in the war room yesterday.

“Yes,” Solas replied, “the mages know what is required, and most of the work is on them. You and the anchor will act as the conduit for their power.”

“Fabulous. Truly the useless figurehead,” Asha knew that her sarcastic joke fell a little flat, but she manoeuvred into position all the same, missing the look that Cass and Solas exchanged behind her back.

A couple more minutes of blissful silence, and then it seemed like everyone else was ready to go.

“Focus past the Herald!” Solas shouted at the crowd of mages, “Let her will draw from you!”

Asha looked up at the Breach, extending her arm upwards and feeling it thrum with familiar energy. _Just me and you, dumb rift in the sky. It’s like old times._ Things had been simple when all she feared for was the stability of her tranquility cure.

Maybe when this was over, she could take Solas’ advice, and get absolutely shitfaced with Sera.

“There’s got to be someone here you want to bang though,” Sera said incredulously. They were both perched on a wall next to Haven’s chantry, watching as people danced and sang and looked up to the sky, just glad to see it dark and no longer green-tinged. “I mean-” she put out her fingers, “you’ve already banged one. Two hundred people in fancy dresses just arrived. And the bard, she’s pretty fit.”

“I dunno,” Asha told her honestly, looking at the bottom of her liquor bottle for the second time and still being surprised to find it empty. It seemed like, when one gained weight, one’s alcohol tolerance also became a more expensive attribute. She was still seeing straight, and her voice wasn’t lisping, which meant things were going badly. “Cass’ pretty, but she doesn’t like girls. Dorian is really, really, _really_ pretty, but he doesn’t like girls.”

“- you think…?”

“Oh come on!” Asha leaned forward conspiratorially, waggling her eyebrows, “when he joined the Inquisition and debriefed in the war room, he didn’t look at the map once. His eyes were on Cullen’s arse the _whole time_.”

Sera sniggered. 

Asha raised the empty bottle to her lips and chased the final dregs before slamming it down on the wall next to her, musing, “man’s only human, I suppose.” If she was being entirely objective about it, it was a pretty impressive arse, even if it did belong to a templar.

“Take your word for it. So, not even baldy? 

“Noooooooooo,” Asha sighed. “He did the thing. With the magic. We don’t like him right now.”

“Well, I’ve _never_ liked him!” Sera replied, “you’re the one who’d actually listen to him drone on. If you don’t want to get into his glorious elven trousers, then Maker’s tits, _whyyyyy?_ ”

“The Maker has tits now?” Asha raked her eyes over the crowd, in search of more alcohol. “As Herald, I should probably keep everyone informed… Abreast, if you will.”

It was strange, to see the impromptu festival that had sprung up as the news of the Breach’s permanent close spread. Four citizens with their own instruments had set up with Maryden and begun playing music that became less discordant as the dusk slowly darkened to blackened night. She wasn’t sure if the bard appreciated the assistance, but accompaniment meant that now the music was loud enough for people to dance to, whirling each other in circles. In some places, the crowd fell into more orderly lines for actual set steps. It wasn’t quite a Dalish revel: the songs were in common, the only story being told was the one of Andraste’s Herald, and everyone was still wearing their shoes - Asha was incredibly dubious of the ability of anyone to dance well still in their _shoes_. But to her, it was the first time Haven had felt like something close to a home. No one was shut up in their houses, everyone was out and laughing under the same sky, like they were clan.

Finally, her eyes caught something close to what she was looking for. Over the tops of fifty or so heads, she could just make out a wide set of horns towering well over the crowd. “Oi, Bull!” she yelled, standing precariously on the wall and waving her arms. Some people saw the Herald, and began applauding, as if she was about to make a speech. She jumped down immediately with a huff of breath. At least she’d caught the attention of Iron Bull and what she saw to be five or six of his Chargers, who started to make their way over

“Have you got any drinks going spare?” she asked, once they’d arrived. “We’re running a little dry here.”

She’d known before she asked that the answer would be yes, and grinned like a child on their birthday as he handed over a half finished bottle that didn’t have a label, but smelt like it contained paint thinner. She coughed and grimaced as a small mouthful burnt its way down her throat like acid. 

Unnamed alcohol that threatened to make you blind: already, it was one step closer to being a Dalish revel.

“We were gonna find a quiet corner, Boss, if you feel like joining?” 

Asha spared a glance to Sera. The rogue grinned, “if they got more booze…”

“No one’s asking me to dance anyway,” Asha said, dismounting from her seat with a shrug, “cowards.”

“An intimidating, beautiful woman like yourself…”

“With a fuckload of holy herald-y duty and a holy glow-y hand to go along with it,” Asha finished Bull’s ludicrous sentence for him. She would admit that she no longer looked like a starving orphan, but ‘beautiful’ and ‘intimidating’ were foolish words to be throwing around in a world where Cassandra Pentaghast existed. She looked down at the anchor, which was still there, unexplained, even after its counterpart had been dealt with. “Prophets don’t dance, apparently.”

“You could always… ask… them?” Bull pointed out. _Ahhh_ , Asha thought - a suggestion spoken with the naivety of someone who’d never word vomited over someone they found attractive.

“S’what I said,” Sera told him as she also hopped down off the wall, “but apparently, s’no one here Her Elfiness wants to see naked.”

“Therefore, the point of a dance is negated, at least to Sera.”

“What? Why bother with fancy footwork if you’re not gonna tumble ‘em after?”

It was then, of course, that Asha noticed that Skinner was among the Chargers who’d accompanied Bull over, hearing all of this conversation play out. _Oh well,_ she thought, taking another swig of paint thinner alcohol before the embarrassment could fully set in. It wasn’t like Skinner wanted to see her naked again either - otherwise, well. It probably would’ve happened. The other woman was quite assertive.

“I don’t know these dances anyway,” she muttered glumly, wiping her mouth as she handed the bottle back. It was true - even the elves among the population of Haven weren’t dancing Dalish steps. 

They followed Bull and his men away from the dancing, back to their camp on the outskirts of the training ground, which was utterly deserted. Barrels, boxes, and one spare chair she thought might have originally belonged to the Singing Maiden were dragged into a somewhat orderly circle, another bottle of liquor was procured and passed round, and Asha found herself finally relaxing, away from Haven’s prying eyes. Although, really, that was probably due to the warmth the painstripper booze was leaving in her belly.

“So Boss, how does it feel to have single-handedly saved Thedas?” Bull asked, from across the circle.

Asha rolled her eyes, “We _literally_ had to wait until hundreds of allies arrived to do this, Bull. That’s the absolute opposite of ‘single-handedly.”

“Allies we wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t gone full reaver on that Vint and his entourage.”

“I thought reavers thrived on violence?” Asha countered, “did I look like I was thriving, when I fell arse over tit out of Redcliffe?”

“Heh, tit,” Sera said succinctly, while examining the bottom of her new bottle.

“Not many people could’ve done what you did, and lived,” replied Iron Bull, coming dangerously close to Solas’ motivation speech earlier. But then he saved it by adding, “ _including_ knocking me flat on my ass.”

“Don’t worry Bull, pretty sure that’s a one time thing,” she said, gesturing at her tiny form with a wide, and hopefully innocent-looking, grin.

“Don’t want you bruising your delicate bottom, now, do we Chief?” added Krem from the side, moving the conversation smoothly onto ‘bruises’ and ‘bottoms’, and saving Asha from yet another discussion of how wonderful and talented she apparently was to have blundered her way through another Inquisition mission. 

With paintstripper spirits in her, the world gradually began to feel easier. She and Sera were soon reduced to a giggling mess, and when she looked at her friend, she didn’t see the haggard, haunted future version who’d ‘run out of arrows making them pay’, only the one who was snort laughing until ale spurted out of her nose. It was only after Sera started recounting a story about how she’d vindictively loosened the seams on a noblewoman’s entire knicker collection and watched a pair of them fall out of the bell of her skirt at an opera that Asha noticed that the person who had moved to her other side was Skinner, talking in reserved, clipped sentences to Grim, but undoubtedly hearing everything they said. And every time they snort laughed.

The other woman _certainly_ noticed the moment that Sera playfully pushed Asha mid-laugh, and the alcohol in her system caused her to overbalance completely and shoulder barge her on her way almost to the floor.

Asha went beet red, as the other woman responded to the intrusion on her own conversation by raising one quizzical, unimpressed eyebrow. “Can I help you?”

“Nothing! Don’t mind me, I’m not here,” Asha blurted. “I mean, I am here. I mean, I’m sorry, you can’t help me, I fell. This barrel is structurally un-sturdy and Sera _assaulted_ me. I wasn’t trying to get your attention or anything. Sorry. Unless you needed me for something! Sorry.”

The drinking circle had slowly gotten silent as she blundered on, giving her embarrassment the attention it quite frankly deserved. The dissonance between the taciturn, cool presence of the other woman and Asha’s own ‘drunk-halla-in-a-temple-of-relics’ personality had never been more apparent.

“Just bang again already,” slurred Sera from behind her.

“Sera!” Asha’s voice was shrill, to say the least.

“You up for it, Skinner? Red’s earned a little stress relief,” said Bull from the other side of the circle, clear amusement in his voice.

“BULL!” 

Skinner shrugged magnanimously, face completely unreadable. “If she’s interested.”

Asha was certain she could not get any redder, and that, coupled with her own slurred speech, rather dented the dignity of her defiance as she stood up to make her next sentence. “Stop it, all of you! I… I am not some hero in a saga who’s… who’s deeds get rewarded with women and booze!”

“Ahh, but you could be, huh, Boss!” he grinned.

“No! Absolutely not!”

“Heroism it’s own reward, then?”

“Please stop talking.”

“How noble of you. Spoken like a true saint. Heraldry's a good look on you.”

“STOP IT! I am _not sleeping with Skinner just because I fixed a hole in the sky!_ ” Asha said that particular setence much louder than she meant to. For a horrible second, the entire group went silent. 

And then all the Chargers burst out laughing, Skinner included, and Asha realised that they’d just been teasing her ruthlessly at her own drunken expense.

“Oh Boss, look… at… you.” Bull grinned unrepentantly. 

“You blush this hard while she sat on yer face?” asked Sera, with tears in her eyes.

“I swear, Creators as my witness, I will open a rift _right above your head_.”

“Stop teasing her,” chided Skinner, with a low sigh.

“But it’s so much fun!" Bull winked at Asha, who wished she could just rewind the last five minutes, or maybe take three more shots to forget they happened. 

“She saved the world today,” his Charger responded in that same flat, impartial voice, “let the girl alone.”

The laughter simmered down, and no one remarked or even made a lewd comment when the other elf tugged Asha down by the wrist so that she was once again sat on her rickety barrel. “Ignore him,” the woman told her, with a sideways glance at her boss, “you get the piss ripped out of you, it means he likes you.”

Asha wished she could stop blushing. That had always been her downfall when teasing started amongst the clan as well. She knew from her time around the Chargers that being teased mercilessly about everyone and everything was a sign you’d been accepted among their number, but she didn’t quite have a mercenary’s constitution for embarrassment just yet. Plus, she really was missing having dirt _on everyone else_ in order to make it a more level playing field.

Skinner silently handed her her own bottle, and Asha took it as a cue to drink. She instantly regretted it, as the vinegar-y taste of cheap wine filled her mouth. “Thanks,” she said awkwardly, handing it back while trying not to grimace.

“Don’t mention it,” Skinner replied, then gave her a long look. “Seriously. I think you might embarrass yourself more if you tried.”

There was awkward silence between them for a good few breaths, enough for Asha to want to find a way to squirm out of the situation. But Skinner didn’t turn back to Grim, and Sera was practically burbling into her cups, so there seemed to be no easy escape on offer. “Can I… ask you something?” she said, drunken recklessness making her just want to break the silence when it reached almost a minute.

Skinner shrugged, took a long drink, wiped her mouth. “If you like.”

“Why… why did you sleep with me?” she felt like it was a stupid question, one that she had to be sloshed to even consider asking. When Skinner gave her a bemused look that said just as much, she clarified, “I mean, if I were you, _I_ wouldn’t want to sleep with me. Look at me. I talk waaaay too much."

The other woman smirked a little at that. Skinner seemed to consider the question for a second, then shrugged again - which, if Asha was honest, didn’t do much for her self esteem. 

But then the elf spoke. “You have a pain like mine,” Skinner told her, eyes dark and unreadable as they looked out into the night, “you were hurt by people who could inflict pain for the sake of it, and now you get to hurt people back. Not many people make those choices, or live to make them. I saw that same pain, that night. We understood each other.”

“Huh,” Asha said, because she couldn’t think of anything more eloquent. She supposed she’d been aiming for ‘sparkling wit’, ‘charming personality’, or ‘stunningly attractive physique’, but the reality of Skinner’s answer made a lot of sense. She remembered how the other women had discussed gleefully hurting _shemlen_ , the first time Bull had introduced her. Two years ago, that would never have fit Asha’s own image of herself, but after her rage at Redcliffe, she could certainly see the parallels between the two of them.

“Also, you have a nice smile,” the elf admittedly slightly sheepishly, and Asha once more blushed all the way to the tip of her ears.

“It was… nice.” She tried not to sound lame, but hey! it seemed that tonight was not her night for that. “I, mean, I don’t really want to do it again, but…”

“I am pleased you did not die.” replied Skinner succinctly, mercifully signalling an end to the conversation.

Asha only pretended to drink from the wine bottle when it was handed back to her, looking out on the shadows of the hills against the equally dark night’s sky. So, that was that then. She wondered if she’d ever terminated a relationship in such an awkward, business-like manner before. Although she wasn’t like some people she knew, who only slept with those they already loved deeply, she hadn’t much experience sleeping with strangers. That was the thing about being Dalish: if you decided to have a one night stand with someone, it was pretty likely they had already lived with you for years. That meant you tended to discuss expectations beforehand: you had to also come out the other side not having hurt anyone too badly, given that you both had many years of cohabitation still ahead. That was business-like in its own way, she supposed.

It was then, staring at the hills above Haven, that she noticed a small flare of flame near one of the peaks. It was there and gone in a second, so small that she wouldn’t have thought anything of it, had it not flared up again five seconds later. Two breaths, and it was extinguished again.

Asha froze. Haven didn’t see many travellers, except for pilgrims, who would’ve made their way to the village rather than set up camps in the hills.

Even then, she might have dismissed it. 

But that was the first sign Clan Lavellan had ignored, two years ago. They’d seen the smoke of a foreign, unknown campfire in the distance, assumed it was a harmless group of hunters or travellers on the road, and not considered whether it might herald something far more sinister. 

“I need… I need to go,” she muttered. As she stood, she thought she saw another flare. This one was gone so quickly that it might genuinely have been her imagination.

She squinted at the horizon again, but even when nothing happened, she couldn't dismiss it. _What if I’m just needlessly panicking?_ she berated herself. She had no reason to think anything was wrong. If enemies of the Inquisition existed - if it wasn’t just Alexius - surely they would’ve stopped them or attacked or whatever… _before_ they sealed the Breach?

But all the rationality in the world could not fight the feeling in her gut, which made itself felt even through the haze of drink. It was like, after having home ambushed once, her body instinctively feared the chance of it happening again.

Asha shambled drunkenly towards the Chantry, ignoring the confused shouts of the Chargers behind her. She needed to at least find and notify someone in the Inquisition’s chain of command, if only to calm her nerves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is slightly late! It was a beast to edit, and some family drama happened over the weekend that also made it harder to get through. Fun fact: we're now at the end of my first google doc xD I had to start up a second because the length of this was crashing my computer!!
> 
> I've tried to make this a breather episode before the next trauma conga-line Asha's about to go through - because SPOILERS! CORYPHEUS IS ABOUT TO ROCK UP. That being said, in case it's not clear, Asha is *not* doing well (hence the content warning for mental health). 
> 
> No author's notes today. Hope you enjoyed the chapter! See you next weekend!


	27. Chapter Twenty-Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An army descends on Haven.

“I’m telling you, something is wrong!"

Cassandra sighed, then leaned further in, fighting to keep her voice level as she continued, “Asha is not herself. She should be celebrating her achievements at Redcliffe, instead she is just a hollow… shell!”

They were trying to keep their conversation cordial in the eyes of those who might be watching, leaving no room for unease amongst the general atmosphere of merriment that pervaded the square. She and Solas had made their way through the crowds of drunken revellers to speak of their concerns to Cullen and Leliana. Neither of them had decided not to partake in any of the evening’s festivities: the thing about creating an organisation designed to solve every problem currently plaguing Thedas was that work didn’t end just because the Breach was closed.

“What she saw at Redcliffe was obviously distressing,” Cullen said tiredly, trying to keep his friend calm. “Whatever her victories, we can’t presume they didn’t come at great cost, just because it was our future selves that paid it, rather than us.”

He personally hadn’t had enough contact with the Herald to distinguish any dips in her current mood from the generally pervasive exhaustion she’d exhibited at the start of their week when they returned to Haven. He’d assumed that fatigue was the reason why she’d not been present at any of her routine practices at the training ground, or in the forest.

“What the Seeker is talking about is more than just the shock of a hard battle,” Solas replied. “She’s becoming… lifeless. She isn’t taking joy in anything. She isn’t meditating. She’s not doing any of the things she chose to give her purpose.” He rubbed his temples, “I have been trying to give her space...”

“The fact is, she’s not a soldier,” Cullen told him patiently. He could understand why her close friends might find it distressing, but one of the things he did value about his templar training was that he had great familiarity with identifying the kind of depression that set in amongst certain recruits. Those that didn’t do well with rigid routine, who couldn’t numb themselves to bloodshed or hardship by calling it duty. Regardless of the brutality of their first active duty - and Maker forbid that their first true battles were anywhere near as violent as Asha’s first few months with the Inquisition had been - often people discovered the hard way that they weren’t ready for the life of a soldier. Some broke through that barrier, as he had. Others didn’t. He’d tried to help as many through as he could. For some, knowing it was a universal feeling was enough; for others, having someone gently tell them they needed to rethink their choice might be the very thing they needed to hear. But it certainly wasn’t easy, whichever way the individual in question fell. 

When the other man gave him a hard look, he raised his hand apologetically. “Please understand, I don’t mean that as an insult. I merely mean to say, we’ve asked more of her than we have of anyone, since she woke up with that mark. I’m not _surprised_ it’s started to take its toll, given that she wasn’t given any specific training to endure it. But now the Breach is closed, we have less use for the anchor - we can give her some time off, to recover, perhaps give her a role that isn’t on the frontlines-”

“But she _enjoyed_ her work on the frontlines,” Cassandra interjected, “that is what is strange. The deaths in the Hinterlands - the sheer number of people _Sera_ killed on their first meeting - nothing has shaken her like this.”

“We have no idea quite how many people she killed in that future,” mused Leliana, who’d been mostly quiet through the entire exchange. “Or who.”

“Sixty bloodmages would’ve been more than enough to take its toll,” Cullen muttered darkly.

Cass pinched the bridge of her nose. “Someone needs to talk to her-” 

“Oh thank the gods, there you all are!”

All four of them startled guiltily, and looked up to see the very woman they’d been discussing approaching them, skirting hurriedly around the dancers. She was out of armour, a little red faced and out of breath, her hair wild and curling around her face. Cullen was ashamed to admit he saw no obvious signs of distress such as her friends were detailing, although she certainly looked harried.

“Fuck, I’m so glad I found you! I need to talk to - ugh, wait a sec.” Asha stopped in her tracks with a groan, doubled over, and with a shudder began to retch. With a cry of dismay, Cass started forward, only stopping when Asha raised a hand to halt her approach. Nothing came up despite her coughing, and a second later the Herald righted herself, tugging stray hair behind her ears and looking thoroughly disgusted, “sorry, I had to mindblast myself to sober up, but oh my gods, that liquor must’ve been made of something truly fucking _vile_.” 

“What is it, _lethallan_?” said Solas, stepping forward. He was about to place his hand on Asha’s arm as if to steady her, when she gave him a hard, unreadable look that seemed to make him think better of the action.

“I needed to speak with you guys,” she looked to Cassandra, Leliana, and then Cullen was surprised to find himself encompassed in her gesture. “I can’t tell if I’m overreacting - I swear, I don’t know if I’m going _mad_. I’m probably just paranoid - no one’s raised the alarm - but I’m still seeing them now that I’m not a glass away from passing out…”

“What do you mean?” Cullen asked sharply.

“The flames! On the hill!” Asha gestured towards the hills at the north, but where they all stood the lights of the Chantry, the bonfires, and the lamps hastily erected in the square for the party all cast out a glow so strong that he couldn’t even see the outline of the mountain range.

The Herald looked directly at him, and at their first eye contact, he could tell she was afraid, and fighting to desperately keep it off her face. She bit her lip, as if she was debating whether or not to speak, then said to him. “Commander, I think we might genuinely be about to be attacked.”

There was a silence. It barely lasted a breath, but in Cullen’s memory it would last forever - the calm before the storm.

And then, with all the timing of a nightmare, the bells of Haven’s watchtowers began to toll.

Another fight. Another battle. Another chance to die.

Asha’s fingers fumbled clumsily on her armour as she struggled to pull the buckles taut across her chest. She’d never really worn armour before coming here - not unless it was ceremonial, which tended to show a little more skin than she thought would ever be practical in a real battle. Mages tended to just wear the same leathers hunters did. And now the adrenaline and fear - and yeah, probably the remnants of alcohol, if she was honest - made her forget all the routine she’d built up over weeks of travel.

Her outfit was bright, sparkling clean. It even smelt nice, like leather polish and lavender. She hadn’t touched it since she’d peeled it off her, sticky and crusted, on her return to Haven, when it had been soaked in grim, slurried water, and blood. She wondered who had washed it - was that what armies did? Have a designated launderer for all blood-drenched, shit-stained clothing?

There were shouts outside, then a scream. Asha shook herself out of her daze, picked up her staff, and then ran out of her little cottage, through the crowds of panicking villagers, towards the main gates. She heard indistinguishable shouts of sentries calling from the walls, and looked up.

The fires were definitely not in her imagination, now. There seemed to be more flames on the hillside than there were stars in the sky.

Cullen, Cassandra and Solas were already at Haven’s entrance, having not needed to collect any of their equipment. Dorian and Vivienne were also there, as was Blackwall and Varric. Even Josephine stood at the entrance, trembling in the cold night air without a coat or cape. But Asha couldn’t see Bull or Sera, and she immediately felt fear, remembering just how shitfaced her friend had been - with no option of undoing it with an easy mindblast. She also couldn’t see Leliana, and she wondered if the woman was already deploying scouts outside the village walls, or planning some other kind of subterfuge. 

“What threat could the ground possibly hold?” Vivienne was saying, “the Herald already conquered the sky.”

"We can't presume to know their motivations," Solas replied, "it might no longer be about the Breach, even."

“Commander?” Asha sprinted up to them all, out-of-breath.

He nodded at her approach, his face grim. “You were right. Our watch guards have reported the numbers: it’s a massive force, they take up the bulk of the mountain.”

“Under _what_ banner are they marching?” Josephine asked.

“None.”

“None?”

“Motherfucker.” Asha cursed. She had known that something was bound to go wrong - there was no way that what she’d done had been enough to avert the future they’d glimpsed at Redcliffe. But what, exactly, had she missed?

“Asha, wait-”

She barged against Haven's main doors, and then cursed again when they proved too heavy for her alone to shift. Light flared in the crack between the thick wood and the ground, and there was a sound of an impact hitting from the other side. 

“I can’t come in unless you open,” came a plaintive, young voice, in the silence that followed.

“Help me!” Asha yelled blindly at the people behind her. Solas, Cass, and some nameless guards took their places at doors with her, and wrenched them open.

As soon as the gap was wide enough to even just slip through, she burst out onto the training ground, hoping to catch any trace of Sera and Bull. She heard a few choice curses from people behind her, but ignored them. The Chargers' camp was empty, boxes and barrels discarded in a hurry. Bodies littered the ground outside of Haven, some of them showing the telltale signs of Bull’s cleaver. A strange-looking scout shambled forward, not wearing Inquisition colours, and Asha reflexively drew her staff, but before she had a chance to warn them off he collapsed, a dagger in the centre of his back. 

Behind them was a pale boy, so pale he looked like he had been entirely leeched of colour. Wearing a ridiculous, wide brimmed hat, and no armour to speak of. 

“...Hello?” she said, as Cullen, Solas, and Cassandra all rushed up to stand protectively behind her.

“Hello,” the pale boy responded in an echo, almost as if it was an unthinking reflex. As Asha looked at him, confused, the dagger wedged deep in the scout’s back flickered and reappeared in his hand.

Well, _that_ wasn't something she was used to seeing. “Um…?”

The boy rushed forward, only his chin visible underneath the brim of his hat. “I’m Cole,” he said, reaching out a hand as if to touch her sleeve, “I came to warn you. To help. People are coming to hurt you… you probably already know that.”

Asha dodged back, evading his touch. “What is this? What’s going on?”

“The templars - they've come to kill you!"

Asha blinked, her heart spasming in her chest and every hair on the back of her neck rising with an unseen chill. “...Excuse me?” she said, much more shrilly this time. Everything felt so unreal, like a poor, cheap copy of the events that had taken place two years ago. When someone voiced her worst nightmare _so fucking casually_ , there was a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

“Templars?” It seemed, bizarrely, that Cullen was even more shocked than she was. As Asha found herself rooted to the spot, unable to speak, he advanced on Cole, angry, though that anger was not at the boy himself. “Is this the Order’s response to our alliance with the mages? Attacking blindly?”

“Asha, are you-” Solas put his hand on her arm, but she shrugged him off. Right now, she didn’t want to be touched, not by anyone, and not even through three layers of armour. 

“What - what do you mean the templars have come to attack me?” she asked, voice trembling, “because I successfully closed the Breach? Or… or…” she swallowed, wishing she didn’t have an audience for this, she whispered at the boy, “is it the men who hurt my clan? Have they come to finish the job?”

“I do not know your clan,” replied the boy, in that same placid voice, tinged with sorrow. “The red templars went to the Elder One. You know him, and he knows you. You took his mages.”

“The Elder One’s here?” Asha asked, at the same moment Cullen said, “what do you mean ‘red templars’?”

 _The red lyrium, it does not mix well… with templars._ Asha suddenly remembered Cass’ words, deep in the bowels of Redcliffe. Oh Creators. Had she told anyone? Had Dorian? Her numerous reports and debriefs over the future version of Redcliffe had all warped into one rehearsed script. She genuinely couldn’t remember if that throwaway line, and its implications, had been included in her recited explanations or not.

Cole’s face became solemn, with something like regret, before turning and pointing to somewhere far off in the distance. “There.”

Asha followed his hand, squinting into the darkness. She could barely see anything, and for a second she thought it was because of the night sky. Then she watched it somehow shift, and realised there was smoke in the way. Stepping out of it, the rough figure of a balding man, who would’ve seemed almost non-threatening to Asha, had it not been for the wickedly, impossibly long sword he wielded. And then, stepping up next to him and dwarfing him, was some kind of stupidly tall, malformed monstrosity. Asha’s brain almost couldn’t make sense of it - it seemed like a jigsaw of other beings - emaciated arms and long claws, some remnants of plate mail armour embedded in its chest, red lyrium shards protruding painfully from its cheeks. 

_That would be the Elder One, then._ From this distance, she guessed he was perhaps roughly three times her size. No amount of strength training with Cass could’ve prepared her for this.

“Well,” she said, failing to keep the hysterical note out of her voice, “I don’t recognise _either_ of those… um… people.”

“ _Samson_ ,” Cullen breathed, next to her, in a tone of voice she’d never quite heard before. She gave him a confused sideways glance, but his eyes were pinned on the man on the horizon.

Cole sighed, “He’s _very angry_ you took his mages.”

“Yeah, well, they most definitely weren’t _his_ mages, and he can, quite frankly, suck my dick,” Asha replied, which earned a very startled look from Cole, whom she supposed she had only known for roughly thirty seconds. She turned to Cullen, “Commander, is there a plan? A plan would be great right about now.”

Cullen cast her a regretful look, “Haven is no fortress. If we are to withstand this monster we must control this battle. Get out there and hit that force. Use everything you can.”

“I was hoping for something a little more nuanced, but you'll have no arguments from me,” Asha replied with a bravado she most definitely didn’t feel. Cullen nodded, opened his mouth to say something, and then seemingly thought better of it and moved back to his own troops. When she turned away herself, she found that all her friends were watching her, as if they were somehow expecting her to dictate the next move.

“We follow you, Asha,” Solas told her gravely, echoing her own thoughts.

Asha blinked, confused. “That strikes me as a phenomenally bad idea,” she muttered. She was no military tactician - she’d learnt that when she sealed the fate of her clan... and that was not the right memories to be dwelling on, when she was about to face down an army of templars. She closed her eyes, trying to give herself a moment to collect her thoughts. It was all well and good telling a monster to do obscene sexual acts from a relatively safe distance, but she had no idea how to deal with the influx of templars about to attack her home, _again_. 

But these templars weren’t _her_ templars, and she supposed that, in a way, that might mean she’d be able to face them. 

“Ok,” she let out a harried breath, and squared her shoulders, trying to shake off her fear. “Vivienne, Solas, Blackwall, protect Haven and get the villagers to safety. Cass, Dorian, Varric, you guys are with me.”

Solas’ hand clamped down on her arm before she even had a chance to finish. “You’re leaving me behind?” he asked, his voice only slightly less controlled than usual.

“You literally _just told me_ you’d listen to me,” she said through gritted teeth. "And yes, I’m taking Dorian.”

“You know, I’d say it was an honour, if you weren’t condemning me to certain death,” came the other mage’s blithe comment.

“Get used to it, Sparkles.”

“ _Lethallan_ ,I know you do not feel that you can trust me right now, but-”

“-You’re right!” Asha half-shouted, “I _can’t_ trust you right now! Creators damn me to walk this earth cursed, but rage might be the only thing that’ll get me through this - and you tried to take that from me last time!” She glared at him, tugging her arm out of his grip, “Furthermore - you know who _does_ trust you? The people of Haven. They don’t know who Dorian is, and half of them are still convinced he’s a magister about to sacrifice their kids to demons. They know who you are - they’ll listen to you. And I need you to find Sera, make sure she’s not passed out in a ditch somewhere because of alcohol I made her drink, and get her angry enough to sober up and move. So if you’re going to put this all on me, fucking _do as I say!_ ”

Solas backed off a little, at that. Everyone looked mildly impressed by her outburst, even Vivienne. 

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” he murmured. He looked almost guilty as he said it, like he knew the words were frankly inadequate.

Asha didn't have time to coddle him. Instead, she snorted, “too fucking late. By about two years.”

“Come on, man,” Blackwall stepped up, put his hand on the apostate’s shoulder, and forcibly dragged him back a few steps, “the lady gave an order, let’s listen to it.”

“Perfect. Fantastic. Fucking wonderful.” Asha said to herself, as Solas cast one last unreadable look her way before their team split off. She wasn’t even certain splitting them was the right decision, but it seemed a little pointless to care. Whatever choices she made, with that many soldiers coming directly at them, they were almost certainly going to die.

The faceless masses of soldiers moved on the dark horizon. Asha could feel her heart thumping painfully in his chest, almost drowning out Cullen’s voice as it rose up from the entrance to Haven - a call to arms: "Mages! You all have sanction to engage them. That is _Samson_ , he will not make this easy. Now, Inquisition - with the Herald! For your lives, for all of them!”

Asha wondered why he'd even bothered using her name in his rallying cry - if the Rebel Mages were anything like her, she figured the majority of them would love to having a conveniently valid excuse to murder a few templars. She detached her staff from her back, flexing her hands across the cold steel as it began to warm to her touch. Varric, Cassandra, and Dorian all watched her with stoic, expectant expressions. She glanced back at Haven, at the people who believed she could protect them. On the ramparts, she accidentally caught sight of Cullen donning his ludicrous helmet. He stopped when he saw her, gave her a salute.

She didn't respond to him, but figured that was as good a sign as any. Turning back to her friends, she nodded to them, and turned to face her almost certain death.

“Who the fuck is Samson?” she muttered to Cassandra, as they began their futile descent into the valley.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent like, weeks, when planning this fic, trying to decide whether Samson was going to be responsible for the Clan Lavellan massacre. Do you know how much easier my life would be if I'd just settled on that?! Unfortunately, I don't feel like it fits consistently with his character. Bioware might be happy having the man's characterisation be all over the place, but I'm not!! It at least means I can do more interesting things with him and Maddox later...
> 
> This is quite a concise chapter, but the next few are very chunky and probably complete slogs on account of all the ANGST. Thanks for sticking with me! ^^


	28. Chapter Twenty-Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fight for Haven begins in earnest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: violence, mental health, implicit references to past abuse, suicidal thoughts (in other words, a Fun Chapter)

“Why… do… we… even _have_ trebuchets?” Asha said through gritted teeth as she and Cass tried to winch the mechanism into place. She’d never questioned their presence before, having walked past them every day, but if Haven truly wasn’t considered a fortress, then why had the occupants before the Inquisition ever bothered with siege equipment? She’d heard that apparently this place had been occupied by creepy isolationist cultists at one point, but still.

Cass snorted, almost despite herself, raising her tired gaze to Asha for a split second. There was a gout of blood - not her own - drying across her forehead. “Don’t question," she said brusquely, "Andraste guides us all.” 

They’d both already killed so many people getting here. Given her extremely patchy, watercolour memories of the Conclave, Asha had never seen so many templars in one place, all so eager for blood. She thought that might be why she was trying to talk normally now, becoming hyperfixated on the confusing defensive logistics of cultists: to keep that screeching, vacuum of panic slowly encroaching on the back of her mind from overwhelming her entirely. 

The valley was like something bought to life out of her own nightmares: not just because these were templars - albeit glowing monstrosities of templars that even her imagination had never been able to craft - but because there seemed to be no end to them. Wave after wave bore down on her party, with all the apparently infinite numbers of a blind, surreal night terror; the kind where you frantically tried to outrun or outlast your fears, and still found them right at your heels whenever you looked back. She knew, realistically, it was because they were merely dealing with the first advance of a vast army, but she couldn’t fight the sense that they would just keep coming, forever, or the futile dread in the pit of her stomach.

Realistically, they were already dead. It was just a matter of choosing a time and a place. What she’d said to Solas was proving to be a lie: she kept trying to seek out the blind rage that had left her feeling invincible at Redcliffe, but it didn’t seem to be answering her, as if it also knew how all this would inevitably end.

“More of them coming!” Dorian called out from his vantage point, valiantly raising his staff even though he too looked about nine inches from death.

“You know, I thought Hawke took me some shitty places, but you are really giving her a run for her money, Flash,” Varric muttered. “You might even have overtaken her ‘angry psychopathic templar’ tally, too.”

“Gods know she can keep that one for herself,” Asha said. She closed her eyes briefly, a moment to prepare herself as she heard the templars’ war cries, growing closer. When would this end? _Why_ wouldn’t it end? Why did she keep having to crank a trebuchet she could barely move, and why was this her responsibility in the first place?

As a cacophony of footfalls signalled the enemy's approach, Cass abandoned the mechanism, causing it to clunk backwards a few notches regardless of Asha’s efforts to stall it. Once more drawing her sword, the Seeker barrelled out and back into the fray. Asha too turned towards the oncoming hoard, rallying to spin another desperate energy blast.

What she saw behind her made her freeze, gasping on a breath her chest couldn’t quite seem to hold. It was not the tableau of horror that locked her in place; not Cassandra’s grunt as one of the assailants’ swords caught her in the meat of the shoulder, or the slumped body of another scout whom she’d never learnt the name of, with blood flooding from their stomach. It wasn’t even one of the red templars close to reaching the platform that she and Varric stood on. 

It was just one man - one face out of the many all charging towards her, on the outskirts of the clearing and still masked by the night. A semi-legible smudge in the darkness - just light enough to show pockmarked cheeks, long dark hair, and a cruel sneer that Asha couldn’t see but could paint in place from memory.

As he raised his sword, his eyes met hers and she quaked on the spot, every single spell she knew dying on her lips. Recognition sparked between them. Asha fought the urge to be sick.

He’d looked so much younger, the last time she saw him. He’d seemed almost lost. Now he held himself with certainty, and that scared her more than any malformed creature could.

And then he distended his jaw in a roar, and the face that Asha’s nightmares had already remade in a hundred grotesqueries became something else even more monstrous. Crimson energy lanced from the hands of another red templar and the nameless soldier screamed as shards of lyrium began to protrude from every available patch of skin, distorting and buckling armour until his chest plate sheared off, his sword dropped with a clatter, and his face was no longer there. Remade of jagged edges, he charged into the clearing, every step shaking the ground.

Only then, with a sob and a wordless scream, could Asha attack. Her hands shook so hard that for a second she thought she might drop her staff.

After that, the battle blurred. She didn’t know what spells she cast. She didn’t even know when that templar fell, because every templar that came at her seemed to wear his face as she wildly, thoughtlessly lashed out. The hunk of red lyrium that moved like a person, that fell, but surely that didn’t mean he was gone? It couldn’t be over that quickly. She’d spent so long waiting for them to come, that for one of them to appear and then not actually lay a hand on her had its own sense of perversity. 

“Asha, now!” Cassandra demanded. Asha turned, stunned, realised her friend was once more at the trebuchet. Bodies littered the ground. She couldn’t distinguish between which belonged to enemies and which didn’t. She walked over them as if through water, tripping over a splayed leg. There was a pain in her side, she didn’t remember getting it, and surely in the woods, waiting for her, they were all there, hidden in the ranks of these new monsters.

“It’s pointless,” she whispered.

“We can still bury them!” Cass grunted, “if we take out the body of the force still on the mountains, we can fight off these waves of invaders. Asha, _hurry._ We can _still save them_.”

Her friend’s urgency cut through the haze crashing over her, and Asha blinked, instinctively grabbing the opposite handle of the trebuchet. With a grunt, she once more started to help Cass turn it. When the motion caused the pain in her side to worsen, she just gritted her teeth through it, let it clear her head. 

She couldn’t let herself be overwhelmed, not yet, not like last time. She had a chance to be useful here, not just another terrified witness to devastation. There were still people alive here, and she couldn’t watch another home die.

“Asha?” there was a relieved breath, “We were starting to worry. Thank the Maker you’re alive.” 

Asha never thought she’d be so happy to see Cullen, of all people, as she wobbled into the chantry on unsteady legs. Adrenaline began to seep out of her and her muscles became leaden - she couldn’t believe she was still standing. Her mouth was gritty with ash and blood. The cool breeze of the Haven chantry ghosted across the new burns across her cheeks and knuckles, making them sting afresh as she helped Threnn limp through the door. 

“Not for her lack of trying,” observed Cass, her mouth a hard line. 

“Our Herald really took her hero potion this morning. Decided that today would be the day to fight burning buildings with her bare hands.”

“I wasn’t about to just let Seggrit _die_ -” Asha cast an annoyed glance behind her, but all she saw was Varric beaming up at her with pride. She found that somehow, she was able to give him a tired smile back, feeling her lip split open as she did so.

Someone took Threnn from her before she dropped them. “Do we have any health potions?” Cassandra said with thinly veiled anger, striding further into the building.

Asha glanced around the chantry. A few ash covered survivors were watching her with wide eyes. They looked at her like they were already waiting for her to save them. Cullen was the only member of the Inquisition leadership in sight. She heard a groan behind her and turned, wondering with a guilty start who in the village she’d missed. What she saw was the pale boy, Cole, carrying an injured Chancellor Roderick.

“He tried to stop a templar,” Cole explained as he hauled the man into a chair. She noticed that he made no sound, even as Roderick’s feet dragged loudly across the stone floor. “The blade went deep. He’s going to die.”

“What a… charming boy...” Roderick sputtered, eyes fluttering shut as he slumped down. Asha silently knelt down next to him, seeing the way his tabard was slowly seeping red. Roderick watched her warily, as if he was expecting her to... Asha didn’t know, stab him again? Open the wound up further? Instead, she scraped at the dregs of magic inside her and desperately tried to ice it over: she couldn’t cauterise a cut that large that went through things that essential - she didn’t have the skill - but maybe she could numb the pain while Cass got ahold of those health potions.

“I appreciate the kindness, Herald, Maker knows it is undeserved,” wheezed the Chancellor. Asha jumped when he put his hand down on her slowly frosting fingers before she could finish casting, “but the boy, though lacking tact, is correct. You should save your strength for...” he took in her form, frowning. 

Asha assumed she must look pretty bad, to earn that kind of a look from a dying man. She withdrew her hand from his silently - even a fatal wound wasn’t enough for her to endure his touch, after all those horrible things he’d said about her. She couldn’t bring herself to speak. She didn’t know what she wanted to say. The look on Roderick’s face told her he kind of knew that. He nodded at her as some kind of understanding passed between them.

“You’re so silent,” Cole murmured, examining her face closely. He stared at Asha with confusion, and a little fear, and she found herself wondering how old he was, or if he was even the kind of thing that could age. When they were all dead, would he somehow be free to walk out of here?

“Sorry,” she replied with a weak smile, assuming he was talking about the fact that she hadn’t spoken since they’d got inside, “the dragon… rather took it out of me.”

“Asha?” Cullen’s voice came from behind her, and she stood up, walking heavily over to him. She already knew what he was about to say, from the look on his face, and waited for him to say it. He took in her blood soaked clothing and sighed, “our positioning is not good. That dragon stole back any time you might have earned us.”

“Do dragons normally… cooperate? With others,” she asked him. “Sorry, it’s my first one.”

“I can’t say I have much experience with them either, I’m afraid - but I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to breathe _red lyrium_.”

Cole was suddenly at her side, still watching her with that same worried expression. “I’ve seen an arch demon. I was in the Fade. It looked like that.”

“Oh, you’re from the Fade, are you?” she asked the boy conversationally. That was one more question answered.

“Yes,” Cole examined her with an owlish blink, “so are you.”

Asha found she liked that idea, as she considered it. “Of a fashion, I suppose.” 

Cullen’s frustrated voice cut through them both, “I don’t care what it is or where it came from - it’s cut a path for that army. They’ll kill everyone in Haven.”

Asha turned back to him then. “No, they won’t.”

Cullen blinked at her, clearly startled by her answer and the certainty behind it. She could understand his confusion - when she’d first seen that dragon swoop overhead, she’d been scared too, as suddenly the rules of the game had shifted dramatically in ways that meant she no longer knew how to play. She was sure no one could’ve predicted this - even someone who’d been to the future would have been caught unprepared.

But then, the rules had shifted again. She had known, as soon as she’d seen Harrit running towards her, begging for the Herald of Andraste’s help, that there was a way to get through this. It was honestly pretty simple.

Cole was the one who spoke first, saying the words in that same tone, like he was afraid of where they led. “The Elder One… doesn’t care about the village. He only wants the Herald. But,” He glanced at Asha with understanding, “that won’t help. It _won’t_. He wants to kill you. No one else matters, but he’ll crush them, kill them anyway... I don’t like him.”

“You don’t like-” Cullen raked a hand through his hair.

“I’m sure there must be a way to make him look elsewhere,” Asha told Cole calmly, glad they were on the same page. “That’s what I need the Commander to come up with - a distraction may be all it takes.”

Cullen was still confused. “Asha, whatever you are thinking, there are no tactics to make this survivable. If Haven were more fortified - if there was no dragon - but that’s not the case, and we’re dying,” he looked at her as if he was willing her to understand, so that he didn't have to say anything more aloud.

Asha’s expression didn’t change. He’d come to the same conclusion she had, just not on the same level of specificity.

Cullen continued, when she remained silent, carefully laying out his thoughts, “but... we can decide how we are to go - we could turn the remaining trebuchets, cause one last slide.”

 _Oh?_ She cocked her head, gave a small, mirthless, and slightly hysterical chuckle, “you’d really sacrifice all of Haven to stop them?”

“Would _you_ rather watch them all get cut down by a templar army?” he demanded.

“My, Commander, look at you, mortally fearing templars - are we finally on the same page?”

 _Did you know a man with pockmark scars?_ she almost said. _He came back._

“As charmingly morbid as this conversation seems to be,” Dorian stepped in, making Asha jump - she’d assumed that he’d left to help the wounded with Varric and Cass. Her friend was looking at her, as furious as he had when they’d first barrelled into Redcliffe’s future together, “all this talk of suicide is simply _not_ acceptable. I didn’t come all the way here for you to drop rocks on my head.”

“You came here… from Redcliffe,” Asha pointed out, not unreasonably.

“Should we just submit, then?” Cullen asked the other man, “Let him kill us?”

“What is this plan, other than submission?” Dorian retorted, “Dying is typically a last resort, not first. For a templar, you think like a blood mage!”

“He’s even afraid of templars now,” Asha noted to her friend in an aside.

Cullen gave her an affronted look, like he didn’t quite recognise the person speaking. “Do you - why are you talking like this?” he asked her incredulously, and she saw him fight the urge to step forward and shake her, remembering that it would not do him any good to encroach on her personal space,“ it’s like you’re… enjoying it! We’re fighting templars, of all things, and all you offer me is sarcasm - is this a _joke_ to you?”

“It’s no good raising your voice at her!” Dorian argued, “This woman practically _threw_ herself on a pyre just to save your piddly village healer-”

“It’s a joke to me, Commander, that you would suggest killing off all of Haven to stop this monster when you can just send _me_ ,” Asha replied, cutting through Dorian’s indignant defence of her honour.

Both Dorian and Cullen fell silent, turning to look at her in horror. _Finally,_ Asha thought as she levelled her gaze at both men, _some quiet_.

“Like Cole said,” she continued, keeping her voice steady. “I’m the only thing here that this Elder One really wants. It's just bad... arithmetic to give him anything more than that. The Breach is closed, so you don’t need me there. I’ve got you the mages to help bolster our forces. _And_ I can stop him before he tries to take me prisoner, if all he wants is the bearer of the anchor. So you, Commander, have got to come up with something better than ‘bury every living soul under a mountain’ before those doors break down, so that my death might actually bring something useful to the table.”

Dorian looked like he, too, wanted to shake her, “I thought we got this kind of logic _out of your system_ in that damn basement-”

Meanwhile Cullen’s expression was slack. He seemed almost lost. “I - you - you can’t - you - even if you did, there’s - there’s nothing we can do, here in the Chantry. We’re all trapped in here now.”

“Well,” Asha replied, interrupting them both, “do any of you _have_ a plan? I’ve offered you the first half, you really need to start working on the second.” 

Asha wasn’t particularly gifted at strategy... and she was so very tired. She desperately needed someone else to think for her.

“Chancellor Roderick can help,” Cole’s voice caused Asha to turn, to see the Chancellor looking almost as pale as the ghostly boy who watched over him. “He wants to say it, before he dies.”

“There is a path,” Roderick rasped as Asha approached, “You wouldn’t know about it… unless you made the summer pilgrimage, as I have. The people can escape from here, Commander. She must’ve showed me - Andraste must’ve showed me - all so I can tell you.”

“I’m not Andraste’s chosen, Roderick,” Asha told him gently, “I thought we were both agreed on that fact.”

The man shook his head, coughed, and winced at what that seemed to do to his blood-drenched torso. “It was whim that I walked the path. I did not mean to start, it was overgrown. Now… with so many at the Conclave dead - to be the only one that remembers... I don’t know, Herald. If this simple act of chance and my small memory can save us, this all could be more than mere accident. _You_ could be more.”

Asha was about to speak up again, to retort, but she saw Cole shake his head minutely. She closed her mouth, thinking better of it. If this man was about to die, she’d have to be a pretty shitty person to try and disprove his god just as he became convinced he was about to meet him.

“Thank you, Roderick,” she said instead, and then turned back to the still pale Commander, who seemed to have gotten paler at this news that meant her plan had suddenly become all the more viable, “What about it, Cullen? Will it work?”

“...Possibly,” he replied, like it was the last thing he wanted to say, “if he shows us the path.”

“Well,” Asha said, “if Andraste’s guiding this, I’m sure he’ll make it just as far as he needs to go, right, Chancellor? And Cole and Dorian will help him.”

“Yes, Herald." Asha and Cullen both winced at the sound Roderick made behind her out of her line of vision, presumably as Cole lifted him up to standing. 

“Dorian, help him,” she said quietly, not able to stand hearing the man in pain.

The mage stood his ground. “I do not agree to this. You must have some kind of death wish, and I will not be your enabler-”

“Dorian, _please_ ,” Asha pleaded. “We don’t have much time, and do you honestly have a better idea?” When the mage fumed silently, she said, gently, “it’s not like I’m killing anyone this time.”

“Yes, you are.”

“ _Dorian_.”

He tried to stare her down, but he was the one that broke eye contact first. “I… I don’t like this.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, “can’t say I’m much of a fan, either. Now, go help the Chancellor, and get our people out of here.”

“I hate emotional goodbyes, you know,” the mage smiled a taut grimace, “I’ve only known you a week, even if that week has been goddamn awful. But…” he sighed, looking like he was almost embarrassed, “for all the friends that aren’t here-”

He stepped forward, pressed his lips gently to her forehead, then clapped her shoulder and walked over to Roderick. Their farewell was over in less than a breath. Asha might have found that slightly terrifying, but this had all happened to her once before. She knew how quickly things moved, when it was all hurtling towards an end. She appreciated the little he’d been able to give her.

Dorian took Roderick’s other arm with a slightly distrustful glance towards Cole, and then they both started moving towards the back of the chantry. Roderick looked over his shoulder, as they moved, “Herald, if you were meant for this. If the Inquisition is meant for this, I pray for you.”

She nodded at him, and then the three of them were gone.

“Perhaps you will surprise it? Find a way?” Asha turned to find Cullen still rooted to the spot, still trying to process this turn of events, and she knew even he didn’t believe his own words. He was looking at her like he’d already seen her die.

“Maybe I can hit it in the face with my staff,” she joked weakly, “the bastards _never_ expect that.”

Cullen’s mouth twitched, and she took that for a win. She wouldn’t have expected a smile, under the circumstances - and more than that, it had just been a rather shit joke. He stared at her for the space of three breaths, until the point where normally she would fidget, then with a shake of his head turned to shout his orders, “Inquisition, follow Chancellor Roderick through the chantry! Move!”

The moment broke. Asha let out a long, hard breath with such force that she swore her legs shook. Ok, so this was happening. The decision was made. It was done.

She moved towards the doors. When she put her hand on the heavy wood, she could feel vibrations and the sounds of destruction from the outside. It was deceptively quiet inside these walls - she might’ve been able to trick herself into thinking they were safe, and she supposed she should be grateful. There hadn’t been walls last time - nowhere to shelter to say her goodbyes, no illusion to protect herself from the knowledge that her home was already gone.

Everything she’d wished she’d done the first time round - she now had the chance to make it right now. She just had to make sure she didn’t turn into a coward again.

A hand on her arm. She jumped, and spun to see Cullen once more next to her. He gestured to three soldiers, all of whom looked as terrified as she felt, “These men will load the trebuchets. My lady, you just need to keep the Elder One’s attention until we are above the treeline.”

“Treeline. Got it.” There was a roar of heat as the soldiers barged the doors open and ran out into the night. They swung shut again, and everything one more turned hauntingly quier. She began to unstrap her staff from her back, but was surprised to see that Cullen was seemingly unable to move, rooted to the spot as he watched her prepare. With a quick glance around, she saw that everyone had fled the upper floors of the chantry with surprising swiftness. Already the chantry's entire entrance hall was empty. Realising that, she let out a small chuckle. 

Cullen gave her a confused look, probably fearing hysteria.

“Sorry,” she said, because that was her reflex reaction to that look in every other situation, “it’s just… we’re alone.”

He blinked, confused, and then looked vaguely horrified as realisation dawned, casting a hasty glance around and noticing the same absence of people she had already marked. “Maker, Asha, my sincerest apologies,” he said as he took four needlessly big steps back, which should’ve been ridiculous to the point of comical. “I - there’s no one else -”

“Cullen,” she smiled, running a hand through her hair - which she immediately regretted, because her hair was extremely gross and sticky. “That’s very sweet, but... look: I have some very, very well-founded reasons to be fucking terrified of the Order, including some newly acquired even in the last hour. But I think we can all say, hands on our hearts, that we’ve found the evil demon templars in this particular scenario, and they’re all on the _other side_ of this door. I was laughing at us both being alone, because all my rules seem mightily inconsequential, now. You’re good. Really.” She paused, “I mean, you should definitely still _leave_ , but...”

“I - I’m glad to hear I pass the exceedingly low bar of ‘not currently ravaging the entirety of Haven’,” he replied ruefully, attempting levity. He seemed to realise he’d done so poorly, because then his expression became more serious. He looked at her with golden eyes, “I - just in case you never - you… you’ve really done amazing work, these last few months. We were truly lucky to have you.”

She grinned despite herself, “really? Even on that first day?”

He gave her a soft smile, “ _Especially_ on that first day.”

They lapsed into silence again. She wondered why exactly he wasn’t leaving. 

“Are you… will you be ok?” the Commander asked, “I mean… they’re _templars_.”

She snorted, both at that same displayed talent for understatement, and the absurdity of hearing such a statement from _Cullen fucking Rutherford_ , of all people. She never thought she’d be stemming the tide of a templar army with the man who’d wanted to ally with them in the first place. “Oh, yeah, that. Well. I’m fucking terrified.” She wondered how he couldn’t see her shaking. 

Her bluntness left Cullen looking even more guilt stricken. She supposed he had as much difficulty sending someone to their death as she did. Something about his expression struck a chord in her heart. She didn’t really want to leave him with the same guilt that weighed her down, but also knew there was nothing she could do to convince him that this decision was entirely her own.

Before she knew what she was doing, Asha closed some of the distance his four steps had given them, reached out, and clapped him on the shoulder. It actually hurt a little - obviously, there was plate mail in the way, as well as that silly fur trim. Plus, her hands were absolutely _covered_ in burns. She smiled at him anyway, wide and sincere enough to make it count. If this was going to be one of her last few interactions with people that wasn’t entirely fuelled by hate and fear, she owed it to herself to make it a positive, memorable one, even if perhaps he wasn’t the first person she’d have chosen to have it with.

“Don’t worry, Commander,” she told him, and was surprised by how heartfelt the words came out, “this all has a certain kind of... poetic justice. I’ve been lucky. I’ve survived enough. I think I can maybe take this one for the team.”

Maybe all of her templars were out there. She’d seen one of them already. She tried to let the thought drive her, rather than leave her terrified.

“Asha, I-”

“I really think you need to leave,” she told him gently, dropping her hand. 

“Yes. I suppose I do,” he muttered. He turned to go, and Asha thought it was finally, finally over, before he hesitated once more. “Asha: if we are to have a chance - if _you_ are to have a chance... let that thing hear you.”

“Are you suggesting I fuck up some templars, and make a massive, colossal mess?” she winked at him, “that _might_ be something I can manage.” She waved her hands in a shooing motion, “Now go! Seriously!”

She turned to face the door, and when she finally mustered the courage to push it open, the Commander was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Damn, what a chonk of a chapter. It was an absolute nightmare to edit. Am I doing the 'enemies to friends' part right?
> 
> The identity of Asha's recognised templar will be revealed in later chapters (the author said, with all the exhaustion of someone who *did* name him in her first draft of this, before realising that that would be a huge plothole because if Asha knew any names she would've given them to Leliana all the way back in Chapter 12).
> 
> I'm considering trying to get out another chapter sometime this week, because this seems like a pretty cruel place to leave you all hanging! I'll see if I have time, if not, next weekend we'll FINALLY meet Corypheus. It only took a stupid amount of words and no small amount of angst. Thank you for making it this far, I appreciate every single person who's willing to stay with me :D :D :D


	29. Chapter Twenty-Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha provides a distraction for the residents of Haven to escape.

Solas waited in the empty chantry basement. 

When Asha sent him back into Haven to round of its residents, he had found Bull and his mercenaries near the pilgrims’ huts, fighting off a group of red templars while Sera had her fingers in her throat behind them, trying forcibly to sober herself up. He couldn’t use mindblast to help, so instead he warped the veil in such a way that it restored her constitution, helped her to process the alcohol quicker and cleanse herself of its effects. He was glad Asha had not been there, as it was a spell that shouldn’t - in her eyes - exist. He made it look like a mindblast to both Bull and Sera - who had informed him in particularly graphic language of how much she valued his help.

When they’d seen the dragon fly overhead, all three of them had swore, but only Solas cursed himself. He’d thought that they’d have a little more time. He’d wanted Asha to have one night of peace, before the oncoming storm.

He hadn’t seen her as they made their way into the chantry with the refugees, and then his time had been spent tending to the wounded in the basement while Haven burned overhead. When Cassandra barrelled down the stairs, grousing about health potions for foolish mages, he assumed Asha had made it into the chantry with her. But before he could ask, Leliana had grabbed the Seeker, hissing feverishly about the route she remembered taking up the mountain in the company of Warden Amell, that she now didn’t seem able to find.

When Roderick, Dorian, and the spirit Cole had arrived, they had found the Inquisition’s leadership already scrabbling desperately at an unremarkable wall, trying to break it open. Roderick had shown them the door they were trying to find, two left turns further, that swung open on ancient caves that howled with an unforgiving wind. Leliana had looked almost angry with the door, like it had personally offended her - but Solas supposed the Nightingale felt that things did not often evade her notice. As it was, he had felt his heart sink with dread as the rest of the Inquisition allowed themselves to hope. This would not be the end.

The last of the survivors and refugees were now squeezing down the dark tunnels. He couldn’t quite believe that they’d even had the time to get them out of the building, though he didn’t like to think about how long the path was, and whether the Chancellor would survive long enough to navigate the final twists. He supposed the unprecedented nature of that good luck should’ve unsettled him, but he was too busy trying to help the final, frightened citizens out of where they huddled in the basement’s shadowed alcoves that he didn’t have any time to dwell on it. Not until he was alone in the corridor, and had still not seen Asha’s face among any of the people who had passed through.

He shivered at the entrance to the pilgrims’ path, but didn’t move. It hadn’t taken them too long to evacuate - there were so few survivors. She was just upstairs, finding stragglers, as he had done so here. It would be fine. She would escape with them. Then he would give her _Tarasyl'an Te'las_ , Skyhold, a new home as penance for the one he’d destroyed today. Then she would be happy, and maybe she wouldn’t run headfirst into danger anymore, and make him fear that her absence heralded another suicidal decision.

Thirty seconds later, he heard footsteps running to where he stood, echoing off the stone. His heart lightened: any moment he would see Asha running to safety, no doubt as ash streaked and dishevelled as she had been the first time he’d successfully made her blush.

It was the Commander who turned the corner. He was alone.

“What are you still doing here?” the other man said, coming to a halt, “the chantry’s evacuated, is it not?”

“Asha has not come through yet. She must not know that we've found a path,” Solas informed him, “did you see her?”

“...Ah,” Cullen said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I thought Dorian would… she’s - uh - not coming. We should go.”

Solas eyes narrowed at the implications of the Commander’s words. “What do you mean she’s not coming?” he asked coldly.

“The silence… she was making herself disappear," came a quiet voice from the shadows behind him.

“Maker’s breath!” Cullen swore, startled by Cole as he walked on silent feet out of the inky darkness of the cave tunnel, where he had not been moments before. Solas hoped, for the spirit’s sake, that the Commander didn’t quite notice the immediacy with which he had appeared.

“I thought you were looking after the Chancellor, Cole?” he asked.

“I was taking away his pain,” Cole said, “He didn’t need me anymore.”

“I see.” So the man was dead, then.

“The Nightingale knows the path,” Cole said, as reassurance, before mumbling confusedly, “though she doesn’t have any wings…”

“Thank the Maker. We should all leave,” Cullen surged forward, grabbing Solas’ arm and dragging him a few steps into the cavern before the other man managed to yank his arm away.

“Not without Asha,” he replied, angrily.

“That’s not an option,” Cullen told him.

“ _What have you done?_ ”

“ _I_ have done nothing,” Cullen let out a harsh bark of laughter, like he was mocking himself. “Absolutely nothing. It is the Herald who has made a decision. We should not squander it. Come with me. Now.”

“I will not-”

“She’s gone to that… that monster,” the Commander cut him off angrily, “she’s buying us the time we need to get ourselves out of here. There’s nothing you can do. We need to go.”

Solas paused. He considered trying to let the pain of that statement sink in, but some part of him refused. He couldn’t imagine Asha dead. The Commander, though - he had no trouble finding fault with him as a distraction. “And you didn’t think to question whether she was in the right state of mind to be making that kind of decision?”

“Of course I did!” The Commander closed his eyes, briefly, then squared his shoulders, “but the fact remains that it’s also the only decision that will save us. I was not in a position to refuse such a plan.”

“So you’ll let her sacrifice herself-”

“- I didn’t _let_ her do anything. She’s her own woman, and she can make her own decisions. It’s not like she’d ever listen to me if I-”

“She sees the same swords, hears the same screams, but the faces are different. It’s all happening again. A monster looks at her, her name on his lips as he transforms, and that means they will all come for her. A decision must be made and this time it will be her who walks the path - her family has left tracks, a trail is in the earth for her to follow. Which gods do you pray to, when you presume enough to knock upon their doors?” Cole’s gaze was far away and his soft voice held pain. He blinked, coming out of the trance, then turned to Solas, “she feels she has not lost enough. But… she lost _everything_. I don’t understand.”

“ _Fenedhis,_ ” Solas swore, vehemently. A spirit of compassion, then. And it didn’t take much thought to work out whom Cole was empathising with.

“I - is that?” Cullen looked confused, but while he might not know immediately Cole’s nature, he had enough context clues from their conversation. “Maker.” he whispered, sounding almost heartbroken.

“She wants her death to mean something,” Cole stated, “we should let it mean something. We need to go. She’ll be angry with you, if she lives.”

“Fuck!” Solas shouted, his voice echoing down into the empty tunnel, surprising himself at the violent way in which his control slipped.

Which gods did you pray to, when you presumed enough to knock upon their doors directly?

Asha walked out of the burning rubble of Haven, wondering if she was forever destined to move among ruins. 

She could pray to Mythal, her chosen patron. Ask her to ensure the people of Haven were safe, that they escaped the fate of her clan. She could pray to Elgar'nan, and ask him to transform this sacrifice into her final act of vengeance, make it feel like a triumph against the injustices that had shaped the fear sitting heavy in her chest. She could even invoke Fen’Harel, promise him anything if only he would let this work. If only he would let her turn the eye of this Elder One away from those she cared about and fell an impossible power, as he had done in the times of Arlathan.

In the end, though, Asha could only think of one god to beseech. There was no one of her clan left, which meant that the prayers of the dead would never be said over her body unless she did them herself.

“O Falon'Din, Lethanavir—Friend to the Dead: guide my feet, c-calm my soul, lead me to my rest." Asha whispered the words as Haven burned behind her. She scanned the sky for dragons. “Fuck.”

She was out of Haven. She’d killed only five red templars on her way - the rest she’d diverted by detonating fire mines to get their attention, and then fade-stepping away in bright flashes of blue. Being obvious and incompetent was the aim - anything to turn their attention away from the chantry, and from the scouts who were going to set the trebuchets. She hoped it had taken her at least ten minutes to make it this far. Ten minutes was still a pathetic distraction, but she couldn’t face them all at once, and they seemed to run in packs. She wasn’t a hunter, able to pluck them off silently one by one, and it wasn’t like she could wail on a bunch of armoured templars with a spirit blade either, as she had done with Alexius. Even if she was able to summon it, she was not an accomplished swordswoman. Gods, how long was she even going to be able to stall? 

She remembered her first real conversation with Solas - how she would be the new hero of Thedas, with her shining stead and grasp of elementary fire mines. Well. She really wished she hadn’t tempted fate.

It wasn’t about being a hero though, not really. It was about… not being a _bystander_. About doing something worthy of all the people who’d died for her, who'd held the belief that her life was more valuable than theirs. Nearly eighty people had died for her, if you tallied Clan Lavellan and then future Redcliffe. More, if you counted the Conclave and the race to the Breach on that first day among her total. 

If her life was worth eighty people, then let her get eighty people out of Haven alive, at least. “That’s only fair,” she told the Creators, in a stern, conversational tone.

She fought her way back down the path, fade-stepping away when the numbers overwhelmed her and then throwing mines at the clumped soldiers left in her wake. It all blurred together and she honestly didn't know how she wasn't speared on an enemy sword by the end of it, but as she sprinted desperately towards the end of the trail she knew that she had eleven more templars to her name, and piles of unconscious bodies left in her wake. 

Asha ran desperately down the path, turning the corner. Once she understood what she was seeing, she stopped in her tracks. It took a moment to make it out in the gloom, but the trebuchet from earlier was still oriented in the direction she and Cass had placed them to fight off the first wave - away from Haven, rather than towards the mountainside. Did that mean… fuck, the scouts hadn’t made it. Bodies were slumped around the clearing, and she recognised the new additions as the men Cullen had sent to accompany her as aid. “Ohhhh fuck,” Asha cursed. The horror of more blood on her hands was dwarfed by more practical concerns: there was very little chance of being able to calibrate one of these machines single-handedly.

And then the world… exploded.

A line of fire tore through the earth from above. Asha jumped out of its way, and an impact moments later meant she was thrown even further, the wind knocked out of her as she tumbled across the dirt with a wave of brutal, scorching, and smoking air at her back. She managed to keep hold of her staff, hugging it to her chest even as it made her fall all the more painful. All her wounds were felt with new freshness as she lay there, gasping, face down, the clatter of debris overhead as she breathlessly muttered a barrier spell through a mouth full of dirt and dust. When it was over, she turned onto her back, the smog-filled night sky whirling dizzily as she tried to force herself up to sitting. 

In front of her was the smouldering ruins of the trebuchet, completely obliterated by the blast. Asha’s heart fell - how was she going to enact Cullen’s plan now? She couldn’t even _die_ right.

As she tried to stand, and her legs refused to comply, a shadow emerged out of the flames. At first it seemed human, then became more grotesque and out of proportion as it closed in, until she could make out to be the impossible, towering figure of the Elder One. She scrabbled up, fell, then scrabbled again, pushing herself backward desperately. She finally regained her footing, and was about to dart away from him, when the ground shook. She turned just in time to see the dragon that had terrorised Haven land on the ground directly behind her.

Asha would never miss tranquility, or think of it fondly. But even she had to admit that the utter terror of facing down a massive winged monster that stank of rancid, decaying flesh, and whose head was bigger than her entire body, was not an emotion she was particularly grateful to have added to her repertoire. It came in a tight second to the body wrecking panic that had hit when she'd felt the shadow of the tranquil brand ghosting her spine. The monster opened its mouth, revealing rows and rows of wicked teeth in a screech that stabbed through her with all the sharpness of a sword, and she really thought that that was it. She was dead.

“Enough.” came a voice behind her, and the dragon fell silent, watching her expectantly with eyes that were too vacant for its gaze to feel predatory. It seemed it was simply there to block her escape. 

So, the Elder One wanted to talk. Bad for Asha, who was worried her heart was going to give out any moment, but good for the people of Haven. Time to be a fine and eloquent distraction.

Asha span to look at him, her entire body quivering with fear. Just to see what would happen, she threw an energy barrage of cold at him - more out of pure scholarly interest, than any actual hope of it working. He didn’t even bother to dodge it - it hit him solidly in his chest, icing up the gaunt withered flesh. The frost left behind then faded away moments later in the heat of the flames, like it had never been there. He looked down upon her with annoyance, like she was an ant caught under his boot. “Pretender.” he said, his voice loud enough to reverberate through her entire body with the same force of the explosion, “You toy with forces beyond your ken. No more.”

Asha licked her chapped, ashen lips, before summoning the courage to speak. “What... what are you even doing here? What was this supposed to achieve?” she shouted at him angrily. “Half your army is buried under snow, and the Breach is _closed_ , asshole. Whatever you were trying to do, it’s over. Just fucking stop!”

“I did not come for the fault in the sky. It is no longer what concerns me, as you well know.”

“So Cole was right - it _is_ about me, then!” she called back, “I’d say it was an honour to be deemed worthy of your attention, not often I meet someone with a 'the' in their title, but…”

“Insolence. Your bravado is meant to be amusing. Such defiant words have often been thrown by mortals at the darkness, to give them the illusion of control. Once, I was arrogant and foolhardy too. And so I know now that everything you say is a lie.”

It _was_ lies, just not in the way he thought. Asha had no desire to shroud her fear with false bravery - this bravado wasn't for her benefit. She was honestly just trying to imagine what Varric would write, if this was one of his stories, and she was Hawke. Hawke, from what Varric said, had had an unrivalled talent for pissing people off and getting them to spill their plans.

“I’m not afraid of you!” she retorted. 

“Then you are truly a fool. Know me - know what you have pretended to be. Exalt the Elder One. The will that is Corypheus. You will kneel.”

“No - no I fucking will not!” she replied, her voice breaking on the words. She swallowed, before rallying, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had to obey anyone’s orders, and I won’t yield to you, you - you - oversized chunk of rock!”

“You, pretender, will know true power soon enough-”

“I’m not _pretending_ anything! I’m not the one making cryptic, self-obsessed statements in an attempt to make myself sound impressive! I’m just _here_ , because you decided to attack my people, without any honour, without even making demands-”

“I ask for nothing,” the monster told her, advancing forward. His hand came up in front of him, and Asha could see he held an orb, crackling with energy. Asha could swear that it, and the pattern of green and red power that whorled around and between the Elder One's gnarled fingers, was somehow familiar, “because it is not in your power to give. But that will not stop me. I am here for the anchor. The process of removing it begins now.”

_The anchor_. Well, the Elder One had managed to find the one thing she feared more than death. She’d come here more than ready to give up her life, but if he simply removed it - if he left her here _tranquil_ \- 

“ _Su an’banal i’ma,_ ” she spat at his face, and then fade-stepped away.

She cast the spell hoping for the kind of distance she’d achieved when she was hurtling towards Alexius in Redcliffe. At this point, a little frostbite might actually be a welcome, novel change to her exhausted, burn ridden body. But as immediately as she cast it, she knew something was wrong. She took a faltering step and somehow… stumbled free of the fade-space, like the spell had sputtered and failed, finding herself only scant meters closer to the trebuchet in flames. She didn’t have time to make sense of the abrupt cutoff of her own magic before the answer came to her in brutal clarity: pain, white-hot and unforgiving, coursed through the anchor as it flared. With a scream, Asha fell forward, as the energy in her hand warped from its familiar green to blood red. For the first time, the anchor felt like an actual _anchor_ \- it pulled her to the ground like a leaden weight. Asha could not stay standing while it burned so strong and fast, even more painful than when it had been unstable on her first day in the valley.

“This is your fault, Herald. You interrupted a ritual years in the planning, and instead of dying in the placid silence of your affliction, you stole its purpose. You took a thing meant to serve the world and claimed it for your own personal redemption, as if that ever mattered,” Asha couldn’t see him, but Corypheus was still talking, even as white pain blanketed her vision, “I do not know how you survived, but what marks you as touched, what you flail at rifts, I crafted to assault the very heavens. And you used the anchor to undo my work. The gall!”

“What… work…” Asha gasped, tears streaming unbidden down her cheeks. “What does it even _do_?”

“It is meant to bring certainty where there is none. For you, the certainty that I would always come for it.”

“Oh, for the love of-” Asha words about stupid, grandiose boasts were cut off and she cried out as she was plucked from the ground by the wrist, with all the elegance of a ragdoll. Her staff clattered to the floor as she struggled against the Elder One’s grip. She tried to summon a winters grasp, a chained lightning, a spirit blade, _anything_ , but then Corypheus _shook_ her, sending fresh fire lacing up her arm, across her shoulder and into her chest, and it became impossible to think...

Asha must’ve passed out then, she was sure, but when her eyes opened again she was still alive, and the monster was still talking, “I have gathered the will to return under no name but my own, to champion withered Tevinter and correct this blighted world. Beg that I succeed... for I have seen the throne of the gods, and it was empty.”

Asha wheezed a bitter laugh. “Fucking… _shemlen_...” she said snidely, gasping through the pain, and wishing her mouth wasn’t bone dry so she could spit in his face. She hissed at him, “my gods have been lost for millennia. You learn to fucking _cope_.”

Something spasmed in Corypheus face, something akin to true anger. _Ooh, that struck a nerve,_ Asha thought, and that was all she had time to think before he threw her, snarling, like she weighed nothing. She sailed through the air and screamed again when she flew over the smouldering, splintered ruins of the trebuchet and smacked into the wooden wall that encircled their clearing. Her head thudded in an impact she felt all through her ruined body, and she tumbled into a bloodied heap on the ground.

Corypheus glared at her where she lay. “The anchor is permanent," he growled, "you have spoiled it with your stumbling. So be it. I will begin again, find another way to give this world the nation and god it requires. And you, I will not suffer even an unknowing rival. You must _die_.”

“Permanent?” Asha rasped, as she dragged herself up to standing. 

Solas had been right: the anchor wouldn’t leave her. It was a _part_ of her. That meant… her sanity, her humanity, her soul. Everything she’d lost once over, everything that _mattered_. It was all _safe_.

A flash of light to her left just outside her field of vision caught her attention - a flare, in the far off distance, way up the mountainside. 

So. They were all safe too.

Asha looked up at the advancing figure of Corypheus and his dragon, then to the smouldering trebuchet, and then up at the mountain it was supposed to be destroying.

She thought about Clan Lavellan, the faces of her family. She thought about how, this time, she’d learnt from her mistakes. She’d noticed the fires, and known what they heralded. She’d saved everyone it was in her power to save, rather than simply watch them fall. She’d been the one to face down the enemy screaming, not the cowering in a hidden corner, protected and preserved through cowardice and others' spilt blood. She’d also… fucked up a _lot_ of templars. She really meant what she’d said to Cullen about poetic justice. What a way to go.

And the anchor, it would stay with her till the end. She’d be herself, when she fell.

The anchor…

Asha glanced up at the sky, to the churning mass of cloud where the Breach had once been. All this closing of rifts… she’d made jokes about opening them up over people’s heads, but the Breach was the only rift she’d ever actually _opened_ , rather than closed. Why, though? Probably because she hadn’t felt like inviting demons into the material plane just on a whim. 

But that didn’t change facts: the anchor was a key, for a very particular kind of inter-dimensional lock. It worked both ways.

And it was _hers_.

Asha pushed herself off the wall as Corypheus drew nearer, wondering what Solas and his fathomless fade expertise would make of the plan half-formed in her head. She would never be clever in the way Solas was clever, but what he would probably take a beautifully crafted monologue to say, she could summarise in less than fifteen words: rifts fucked things up, and what she needed wasn’t a trebuchet, but an avalanche.

“Fuck you!" She screamed, "Fuck you, fuck your stupid smelly dragon, fuck your ugly withered face and your speeches that make no fucking sense!” She extended anchor out in front of her, and shouted, “I’m glad I took your mark! I’ve seen the world you want to make, and it’s all just meaningless rubble! I’ve already foiled your plans four times over, and just... look at me! I'm nothing! And that means I _know_ the Inquisition will stop you, that we will keep stopping you, and you won’t even have the privilege of featuring in my nightmares!”

“Four times-” she heard him echo, but then she pinned her gaze on the mountain above him, directing all her awareness into the anchor, and _tugged_.

A far-off roaring, not unlike an explosion, echoed over the hillside, as a plume of emerald energy flowered outward from the point on the mountain that Asha had been staring at. She was fleetingly grateful that she hadn’t been overly optimistic about the anchor’s range. Then, she only had two breaths to pray, as Corypheus looked behind him, confused, trying to work out exactly what she’d done. This time, she chose Fen’Harel, given that it was he who’d loosened an arrow blindly into the sky and simply known without fear or doubt that it would strike the killing blow against a great beast. She knew intimately - heh, _firsthand_ \- the strong pull and warping, suctioning energy of a rift in the veil, but if she hadn’t opened it directly in the snowdrift, that inexorable force wouldn’t matter.

Suddenly, the howling of the rift became a rumbling of the hillside, and Asha yelped in delight as the snow shifted, its foundations eaten up by the tear she'd fashioned in the fabric of reality. And the avalanche began. 

She made a rude gesture at Corypheus with her anchored hand, and as he began to snarl at her in frustration, she simply started running. She didn’t plan to live - not really. She just didn’t want to get dragon-ed to death. 

So when her ankle twisted and she fell forward, through weak, splintering wood, she let the darkness swallow her without many regrets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aannnnd we're out of Haven! FINALLY! I hope you liked this chapter! Rather than fuss around with trebuchets, I decided I wanted to make the introduction of the new anchor mechanic into a grand narrative moment, and not just a traditional levelling up in video game terms.
> 
> Author's note: the final little anecdote/myth about Fen'Harel that inspires Asha's prayer is taken from the codex entry 'The Slow Arrow'. You can find it on the Fen'Harel wiki page - I was so pleased by how well it fits with this moment in the story!


	30. Chapter Thirty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath of the battle for Haven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: suicidal thoughts (sort of)

Asha looked out on the howling waste of untouched white snow, and wondered why she couldn’t let herself die.

Waking up on the ice cold cave floor, _somehow_ , had seemed like a grand, cosmic joke played at her expense. “Are you _fucking_ kidding me?” she'd whispered, as she came back to consciousness. All she got in response was a dusting of snow that trickled down from the unseen heights above, the only indication of the avalanche she’d planned to die in. No one’s - _no one’s_ \- luck was that good. She wondered if the Dread Wolf had heard her prayers for the success of this entire ruse, and then decided to turn them into a double-edged sword before pushing her onto it, the way a true trickster would. 

She’d been ready to die, and honestly she figured that she might be better off if the world had just humoured her and let it happen. Her back was an aching, bruised mass of ruined muscle. Her head was sticky with blood. She didn’t have a staff. Her anchor was screaming in pain from the Elder One’s assault, her non-anchored arm was broken, and she was lucky it wasn’t a leg, because otherwise she would’ve had her death transformed from a momentous sacrifice into an unpleasant stretch of starvation in unknown, ancient caverns that no one would think to search. It was that visual - the long, slow death, alone in the darkness - that forced her up to her feet, limping through the unmapped caverns in search of a breeze.

Setting out terms and conditions for your death meant that it was mightily inconvenient when those terms were denied to you. Asha had been prepared to sacrifice herself for the people of Haven. Now the people of Haven were saved, and suddenly dying didn’t seem so appealing: not when it didn’t have any clear reward.

Halfway through dragging herself through the cold, lonely caverns, she realised that she'd spoken in future tense, when she hurled insults at that monster. _I know the Inquisition will stop you, that_ we _will keep stopping you._ If she wanted to continue being of use to the Inquisition, she had to get back to them and tell them everything Corypheus had said - Creators, she also had to give them the name _Corypheus_ , so they knew what they were even up against. 

But even though she’d now somehow survived her predetermined end, and admitted to herself that she was invested in weathering the aftermath, it wasn’t like she was magically in less deadly peril. Things didn't get easier. There was just… so much left to do. She’d genuinely thought, for a few blissful seconds, that it was over.

She tried not to cry as she looked out onto the featureless mountainside, bracing herself for the moment when she made the decision to leave her sheltered position and trek aimlessly in… a direction. She had no idea where she was, or if she’d find anyone - if this cave system had deposited her facing east, she’d be stuck in the Frostbacks with no food or water, and no paths to follow to get her to civilisation. 

Exposure was a kinder death, she supposed. No time for starvation or dehydration to set in.

“ _Banal nadas_ ,” she muttered to herself, and stepped out into the unforgiving night air.

The night was long, and dark, and quiet among the remnants of the Inquisition, who erected half a camp in silence and then sat listlessly round the fire.

It had been eight hours - a whole working day - since they had successfully fled Haven, even though the darkness seemed to stretch out endlessly and time had little meaning. The Red Templars had attacked at sundown, and now it was the early hours of the morning, that time that was ink black and lonely. Everyone was tired, but very few slept. 

Cullen kept his eyes pinned on the horizon - though that definition of ‘horizon’ was currently about ten meters beyond the campfire, and then a formless shadow that blended into all the other darkness, and sometimes seemed to shift. 

If he’d thought Solas was angry, feeling the man’s accusatory glare pinned to his back as they groped their way through the caverns pointedly alone, then he’d been in no way prepared to weather the storm that was Cassandra Pentaghast, waiting for them at the other end of the mountain path. She’d taken one look at the two of them - Cole, whatever he was, had already spirited ahead again, saying the wounded needed him - and then at the space behind them where she’d obviously expected Asha to be, and she’d known.

“She did something, didn’t she?” she growled angrily, “you _let_ her…”

“Cassandra,” he couldn’t help how terse his voice was. Why anyone thought he, of all people, could ‘let’ Asha Lavellan do anything, or even have a say in her behaviour in the first place, was frankly beyond him at this point. “The Elder One, he only wanted Asha, and she-”

“I told you something was wrong!” his friend shouted back, “she was throwing herself at powder-kegs, back in Haven - at burning buildings! She was fighting _templars_ , Cullen! And now you mean to tell me that she’s not with you? That she’s-”

“You know I would’ve stopped her if I thought there was any other way. She made a decision-”

“A decision to give up her _life_ , which she’d clearly deemed worthless-”

“You should not make someone believe they are your people’s prophet, Seeker,” came Solas’ quiet, measured voice behind him. “It makes it easy for them to choose a martyrdom instead.”

“I’m sorry Cassandra,” Cullen murmured, touching her arm. “If we’d had more warning, maybe we’d have - but this was the only way we could survive.”

And then a bruised and bloody-nosed Sera had emerged out from the rocky outcrop she’d been hiding behind in order to eavesdrop on their conversation, and started screaming expletives and trying to punch him.

Her efforts had been interrupted when they all saw the eruption of green rift energy along the opposite mountainside. They'd fallen silent. Next to him, he heard Solas let out an incredulous huff of breath, almost like a surprised laugh. Then, the avalanche. Cullen heard the roar like he was stood right next to it, until he realised it was all just the roaring in his head - the realisation that Asha had succeeded, and what precisely that meant, for them and for her.

There was a shapeshifter amongst Fiona’s rebel mages - someone who’d read a transcribed copy of Flemeth’s Grimoire kept in one of the Orlesian Circles. He transformed into an owl and was dispatched to scout the valley in the aftermath. He returned, informing them that all of Haven was buried, and that there was no movement amongst the wreckage, other than a few smouldering, sputtering flames.

That’s when they started setting up camp. Cullen wasn’t sure what else there was left to do. He was good at making camps, after years of being drilled into mindless military routine. And it was _mindless_. His head was just… that same roaring emptiness, that didn’t abate when camp was finished, and his soldiers dispersed. Leliana and Josephine huddled silently by the fire, and he, Cass, and Solas all watched the darkness for some kind of sign that none of them dared name. Meanwhile, Sera fished out another flask from somewhere on her person, and proceeded to silently drink it until she passed out. At some point, Blackwall had looked down at the rogue, crumpled and snoring in the snow, and gently picked her up, depositing her into one of the tents to sleep it off.

Cullen thought that they all might prefer the dark. When light came, the bare mountainside would be there before them, and they wouldn’t be able to trick themselves into believing there might still be a chance.

“I - wait -” suddenly Cullen felt an iron grip on his arm, startling him from his grim thoughts. Solas was stood next to him, his eyes trained on the darkness beyond, brow furrowed, desperately searching something out. He narrowed his eyes, then heaved a sharp, staccato breath, pointing, “ _there_.”

Both Cassandra and Cullen followed the direction of his gaze. For a moment, Cullen didn’t see anything, and then -

“ _Maker-_ ”

“The Sacred Andraste be… be... _fucking_ praised,” Cassandra whispered, in a manner that would’ve scandalised the likes of Varric Tethras.

In the distance - the far, far distance, so faint that he would’ve dismissed it as his wilful imagination - a wavering green light was dancing against the black night, illuminating a halo of white snow underfoot, and the tiny figure wrestling their way through it.

“Cullen!” Cass barked, and she span back to frantically search the camp and pick up one of the few blankets they had, before sprinting out into the darkness. At her shout, Leliana and Josephine stumbled to their feet.

“Well, are you coming?” Cullen demanded of Solas, who hadn’t moved from his spot, his eyes still pinned on the wavering light of the anchor and the woman who held it.

“No, I… I should stay back.” the other man replied, his expression carefully stoic in a way that frankly wasn't fooling anyone. Solas was the one who had been searching, who had found her first

 _Maker… why?_ Now was not the time from restraint, surely? But Cullen had the presence of mind not to say that out loud.

“ _Cullen!_ ” came Cass’ sharp order, now also from somewhere in the darkness. Cullen sprinted out after her, stumbling through the snow as it deepened to his shins and he lost the benefit of firelight. A cool, bright white glow illuminated him from behind, and he turned to see Dorian also running after him into the dark, his staff burgeoning with mage light. The wind was fierce, and the trek uphill was difficult. They both soon caught up with a winded Cassandra, and soon all three were wading through snow side by side. It seemed impossible for them to even get any closer. Then, new urgency kicked in as they saw the light ahead waver and drop, like the wielder had collapsed.

“Asha!” Cass shouted, and started running again, barrelling through the knee deep snow.

After what felt like an age, they found the Herald huddled on the ground, shivering. She cradled one limp arm in the other, every inch of her bore a grit-studded injury, and her hair was matted with blood. She raised her head slightly when she saw Dorian’s approaching light, “...Cassandra?” she called out, disbelieving. Then, with an incredulous snort, she fell forward bonelessly.

“Asha!” The Seeker was on her first, swaddling her in the blanket with little thought to the Herald’s actual wounds. Cullen heard the Herald’s pained gasp and then fell to his knees at her other side, stilling his friend’s frantic movements and rearranging the blanket as they both gently pulled her onto her back.

“Asha?” Cass jostled her shoulder, more gently this time. Now that Dorian’s light was closer, they could both see that her lips were blue with cold. “What happened?”

Asha let out a rattling breath, “did a thing… with a dragon.”

“An inadequate answer to a completely inadequate question,” came Dorian’s arch comment from behind the three of them, “what she means is: ‘how the everloving fuck did you survive’?”

“Oh… fell. Far.”

When they were silent for too long, the Herald cracked one eye open, squinting against the light at their shocked faces. “Is it… bad?” she rasped, “...will I have a scar?”

Cass’ laugh was an almost sob. “No scars to report as of yet,” Cullen said, when the Seeker didn’t seem capable of replying. He surveyed the sheer amount of blood that coated her clothing, _just potential brain damage, or something along those lines._

“Oh,” Asha sounded almost disappointed as she murmured, “Your scars... both so pretty, wanted to get in on that,” she tried to lift her good hand to gesture in the general direction of their faces, and then winced, and seemingly thought better of it, “action.”

“Ever focused on the Inquisition’s primary objectives, Herald,” Cullen replied in a voice that he hoped sounded dry, rather than just shell-shocked.

“Not the- ARGHH!” she shrieked as he placed his arms under her body and lifted her upwards, swaddled in her blanket. The sound tapered off to a groan and then a whimper, and she abruptly passed out. Cullen and Cassandra gave each other utterly lost looks over the top of her bloodstained head: trust Asha Lavellan to be attempting humour just inches from near death.

They were halfway back to the camp when she roused again, wriggling ill-advisedly as her cheek pressed against the cold metal plate of his armour. “Please try to stay still,” he hissed down at her, “we’re getting you to help.”

“Oh.” was the response, and she stilled and quieted in his arms. For all of about five seconds, before he started hearing her make a spitting sound. Confused, he looked down, and bit back a sigh: it seemed that the Herald had got some of her hair stuck in her mouth after... _limping half-conscious through a howling blizzard_.

“Y’know, Ellana would love this,” she murmured, almost sleepily, after some time had passed and the camp fire once more became visible up ahead.

“I don’t know who Ellana is,” Cullen replied gently, before realising that, actually, he did. He remembered she’d briefly mentioned a sister with a much more sensible name to Josephine, in the first war room conversation they'd ever had.

“Fighting dragons, daring escapes, stupid bridal carries,” Asha sighed tiredly, her words dazed, like she wasn’t really aware that she was talking, “always liked it when I told her stories of heroines being saved by handsome strong men. Just her type...”

Cullen wasn’t really sure how to respond to that one, especially with both Cass and Dorian perfectly within ear shot, their amused, befuddled glances over his shoulder the _only thing_ that was making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. “Well, in this case, Herald, _you_ technically saved all of _us_ ,” he pointed out, diplomatically.

“Fuck yea’I did,” she said, then cracked open one eye, “...I did, right?”

Cullen tried to give her what he hoped was a reassuring smile, “we got all of them out, Asha. Because of you.”

“ _Banal nadas_ ,” she murmured, almost to herself, and then fell blissfully unconscious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note: so, 'banal nadas' has several meanings according to multiple sources, apparently (I just took it off the wiki page when drafting). So here, it means "nothing is inevitable".
> 
> Hope you enjoyed this chapter! Short and (hopefully, a little) sweet xx


	31. Chapter Thirty-One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What comes next? (Soon you'll see)

Asha woke up with a start, her mouth woolly and tasting of tacky blood. Above her was a tent canvas being buffeted by howling, icy wind, and she realised she was wrapped in a stupid amount of blankets. The wool protected her from the chill, but also clung and began to meld in places to her sticky, disgusting armour, that she was pretty sure she was going to have to shed like a snakeskin when the time came. Her arm was no longer broken, and that gave her some clue to how long she’d been unconscious - that kind of injury wasn’t easy to heal.

When she tried to ask the chantry sister nursing her precisely how long she’d been out, she was met only with an ardent, awe-filled stare that made her stomach sink even before the words were out of the woman’s mouth, “y-your worship, Lady Herald, you’re awake. Don’t be sitting up, my lady please, I’ll find someone worthy of speaking with you-” before fleeing.

“But I was speaking to you-” Asha called to her retreating back. _Oh fuck._ Even though Asha had to admit that the recent culmination of events had been pretty badass, she didn’t like the idea that it would cause everyone to be back on their Herald of Andraste bullshit.

She felt lighter, somehow. Maybe it was the aversion of her seemingly inevitable death, maybe it was the fact that she felt, finally, that she’d done something worthy of all the admiration people seemed desperate to heap upon her. She almost felt… optimistic. It was a weird experience, if only because it was miles away from the yawning void of shock and despair she’d encased herself in the last time she was awake.

Sitting up fully, Asha saw a vaguely familiar face laid up in the bed next to her, the top half of their face swaddled in bandages but their good eye open and watching the Herald of Andraste warily. “You’re honey-on-bread Brienne!” she said, grinning down at the soldier as she tried to swing her legs out of bed. That particular move did result in a dizzy moment of vertigo, and she gripped the edges of the cot as she reassessed her feelings on gravity.

Brienne, the guard who’d led her into the interrogation chamber on the first day, cast her a wary look.“My name’s Brienne, yes. Your worship.”

“Hey, I could’ve slipped up and said Honey-on-Brienne, and then accidentally propositioned you in the most awful manner, so really, all told, we should take this as a win,” Asha said cheerfully. Brienne’s gaze still had something of hero-worship, but it was already dimming, and Asha hoped she’d be able to annoy her out of it in no time at all. “How long have I been out?”

“...It’s been a day.”

“It certainly has.”

“No, my lady, you’ve _been out_ for a day. Sort of.” Brienne slowly replied, proving Asha’s suspicions right - that she couldn’t be mistaken for divine once you actually heard her speak. “You were bought back this morning - yesterday morning. It’s past midnight now.”

Less than twenty-four hours unconscious? Asha couldn’t help but feel vaguely cheated - she felt like she deserved at least a week.

“What would you have me tell them? This isn’t what we asked them to do! The Breach sealed no less than a day ago, now we’re going to ask them to fight an archdemon? They’re not _Grey Wardens_.”

At the sound of raised voices, Asha leaned around the mouth of the field hospital tent to catch a surreptitious glance at their owners. The Inquisition’s leadership were all crowded around each other, and all looked grim, dismal, and so thoroughly exhausted that her twenty-four hours of sleep suddenly felt like the highest privilege.

“We cannot simply ignore this! We have Asha - we have the anchor. We must find a way-”

“And who put you in charge? How do we know how the Herald feels, given that she’s unconscious, and just faced death for us, for a cause we know she doesn't fully believe in?"

"We need to establish a consensus amongst all bodies of the Inquisition, or we have nothing.”

"The bodies of the Inquisition? What we have is people, and nowhere to put them! We should be focused on taking care of those we've taken responsibility for, not thinking of what to throw them at next!"

“Please, we must use reason. We need those people on side. Without the infrastructure of the Inquisition, we’re hobbled.”

“And we can’t just appropriate them all for a battle they might be unwilling and unable to fight! This Elder One came from nowhere - we can’t just make people's safety conditional on them facing an unknown threat capable of levelling entire villages.”

“Technically, that was Asha,” Cassandra muttered.

“Josephine didn’t say we would, Commander,” Leliana replied angrily, “but the Elder One _didn’t_ come from nowhere - he is at the root of the problem we are already fighting. Are you really going to squander all this hard work just because the situation got _worse_?”

“Enough! This is getting us nowhere.”

“Well, we’re agreed on that much.”

A voice at her ear, soft and barely even disturbing her hair: “You need rest.”

“Elgar'nan’s _fucking_ abyss - Cole!?” Asha jolted in her seat, feeling ashamed to be caught eavesdropping, while at the same time certain that the shock of Cole appearing directly next to her with no warning had set back her recovery time back about four weeks.

“You are supposed to be sleeping,” the boy said, “why are you not sleeping? I can help.”

“I’m good, thanks. I’d rather be awake,” she held up her hand, gently warning him off. Just what was he, this strange translucent boy who could apparently appear from thin air? 

“I’m not thin air, you just forgot me,” he told her calmly.

“That is not really reassuring in the way I think you might think it is?” Asha told him weakly, trying to take it in her stride that he could apparently read her unspoken thoughts. She remembered the kind way he’d spoken to Roderick - even though it was unnerving, hopefully he was doing it with the best of intentions. Maybe he couldn't help it.

She leaned forward again, to peer out at the way Leliana, Josephine, Cullen, and Cass were all stomping angrily away from each other. “Why are they fighting?" Asha asked, confused, "What is there to even fight about?”

“You broke the path so that the Elder One could not follow, and now they have time for thinking, and with thinking comes doubt and with doubt comes blame.” Cole peered around her shoulder, and Asha was… discomforted to notice that he still barely made a sound, and his body emitted no warmth to herald its presence, “they’re talking about the Inquisition but that’s not what they’re _talking about_. They all wish it had been them who - they would understand if the choice had been theirs, not yours. They wonder whether they would’ve been strong enough to make it.”

“It’s not a competition,” Asha grumbled. 

“What happened should never have happened. They see what they could do differently,” Cole’s eyes flickered to each leader in turn, “more planning, more deaths, more courage… a - a- well, she just wishes she’d given you a health potion and then dragged you very, very far away.”

Asha snorted. That sounded like Cassandra. “Do we know where Corypheus is? His templar army?”

“All are lost, _you_ are lost, and that means we can’t be found.”

Asha tried to take that as positively as she could. “Then it’s fine, right? Why the fuck are they just… yelling at each other? Cullen is right - we should be getting somewhere safer. And warmer. Maybe Redcliffe can take us in - I heard the Bann was moving back? We can have the luxury of an existential debate when that’s all taken care of.”

“Bright, impossible light, a flower on an empty hillside, a scream, the knowledge… Hair like a banner, face and mind carefully empty, accepting that there’s no hope. Small, so very small-”

“Woah, stop!” Asha impulsively reached out to touch his shoulder, and was half surprised to find that he was actually… solid, that her hand didn’t just go straight through. “Please, try to explain. Clearer.”

“They all saw their Herald fall. You were _dead_ , the Elder One killed you…”

“Hey! I’m not dead! In fact, I’m way less dead than I should be, considering I sort-of-fought a dragon.”

“...And you _came back_. They wonder if they deserve you coming back. They know they are wanting. Every flaw laid bare by the simple fact of her breathing-”

“Seriously? I’m hardly perfect,” Asha wondered if such things should make her blush, but mostly they just left her frustrated. No one should take her blind luck as a benchmark, considering all the other frankly stupid things she’d done. It was that problem of being a person, versus a ‘Herald’, again.

“They think you are divine,” Cole whispered, echoing her own thoughts - maybe literally. “How can you be anything but, when the flame flickers and wanes but is never lost to the darkness? What does that make them?”

“People who are infinitely more qualified to be dealing with this than I am,” Asha muttered, “didn’t Leliana _fight_ an archdemon? Didn’t it die? What the fuck is wrong with these people?”

“The Elder One is Corypheus, and Corypheus is a monster, a god,” Cole told her, “they are not monsters or gods.” Then he frowned, squinting at her, “you are not a god, either.”

“Well, at least you understand,” she sighed, patting his shoulder again before moving away. “They shouldn’t be waiting for some kind of divine sign. _I’m_ not going to be giving it to them. We’re the only ones who’ve bothered to care about all this in the first place. That means it falls to us, whether they like it or not.”

She stood up, and was then immediately given about thirty reasons why that was a terrible, terrible idea. Still, stiffness of body and blood drenched armour aside, it seemed like nearly everything worked, even if it was working extremely badly. 

“I can give them one.” Asha turned, to see Cole watching her, asking a question. “A sign. If you want them to fight with you, I can make them fight for you. An army needs more than an enemy, it needs a cause.”

“Cole,” Asha said warily, alarmed by the words ‘make them’, “I’m not sure-”

“I think it will help.”

“Cole-”

“You believe people are good,” Cole told her, though his eyes were no longer watching her but instead looking out over the camp, “they believe it too. They just need reminding.”

“And I can do that by knocking their damn heads together and-”

Suddenly, a note rang out in the air, cutting Asha off. She followed the line of Cole’s gaze and saw, on the other side of the clearing, that the figure she recognised as Mother Giselle had stood up, and was… starting to sing.

Asha watched - with some mounting horror at what she presumed to be Cole’s influence, and not a small amount of second-hand embarrassment as someone who rarely _ever_ sung in public - as the campfire took up the hymn that Giselle started. Leliana joined in, then Cassandra, then Cullen. Asha inched forward, out of the tent and into full view. A few eyes alighted on her - shock, surprise, and relief to see her there standing and breathing, if grimy and bloodstained - and the song swelled in volume. Asha shut her eyes briefly, wishing she was practically _anywhere but_ here, so very out of place amongst all these people who were looking for something greater than what she was. She wondered guiltily if she should join in, but she didn’t recognise the tune, so couldn’t even make a fair go at mouthing the words.

She wished, albeit briefly, that she believed. Not in Andraste, of course, but in the idea that some kind of divine being would do the hard work for them and get them through to the other side. In the end, all she had to go on was that she’d faced Corypheus, and somehow managed to live. If someone as incompetent as her could survive, working alone and winging it, an army of people were bound to have some kind of chance.

She wasn’t sure why the rest of the Inquisition couldn’t look at the facts, rather than singing through their problems. But Cole was right. Somehow, when the song climaxed and then came to a close, everyone was smiling despite being in the middle of a frigid wasteland. Kind of sickening, really. But she quirked her lips in response when she saw Cullen and Cass watching her from the other side of the campfire, raising her hand to her forehead in an awkward salute. No more arguments - at least not tonight.

When it was over, Asha turned back to Cole, “did you do that?”

He looked almost shifty at being caught out, closer to young, teenage boy than ethereal being. “She already wanted to, I just… helped.”

“That is... _extremely_ worrying,” she replied, fighting to keep her voice calm.

“Was it wrong?”

“I don’t - I mean -”

“Asha - is this a good time?” came a voice from behind her. Asha jumped, and turned to find Solas standing there, watching her with a blank mask of an expression. His face was often calm and stoic, but that was a natural state. This looked far more…constructed. Like he was worried, and trying not to show it. Asha decided she didn’t care - he was one of the people she needed to share her one piece of good news with.

“Solas!” Asha grinned, concern about Cole momentarily forgotten as she bounded the rest of the distance between them, “I wanted to talk to you!”

“You… did?”

“The anchor!” his questioning pause was all the permission she needed, and she waved her hand all in his face, waggling her fingers like a gleeful child. “You were right! It’s permanent! Corypheus - I mean, that’s the Elder One, the clawed red lyrium fucker - he tried to take it from me, but he couldn’t - he didn’t even try to lop my hand off or anything! He came all the way to Haven for it and just... gave up! He said it’s useless to him!”

She smiled at him, willing for him to understand and finish her thought, because in her experience he absolutely loved doing that. When he continued watching her silently, she found she couldn’t contain it anymore, letting out a tiny, excited squeal that caused several people in the camp to look in her direction, “the cure! My tranquility cure! It’s not going anywhere! It’s mine! _I’m fixed_.”

Solas’ mouth twitched in something of an almost pained smile, which Asha found disappointing - she wanted him gleeful, like she was. “My sincere congratulations,” he said, in a tone that was almost dour enough to suggest anything but, “I was hoping to have a word, if it pleases you?”

“Um, sure,” Asha tried not to deflate, worried by how serious he was being. “Now is as good a time as any, I guess.”

As he led her away, he didn’t say anything to explain why he seemed so tense. He didn’t say _anything_ \- not about what had happened, not about her confirmed cure, not even about how she was standing up and walking around, when she probably really shouldn’t be. Maybe he was worried that she was still going to avoid him? She was definitely still angry about the peaceful aura he’d cast over her, but even Asha had to admit that nearly dying had put her petty grudges somewhat into perspective.

“It seems the spirit known as Cole has a rather theatrical knack for timing,” Solas observed neutrally, once they were stationed on a more distant outcropping, and the veilfire was lit with a single wrist flick - leading Asha to think that Cole wasn't the only one with a flare for dramatics. “there are moments that will unify a cause - or fracture it. He picked a perfect one.”

So Cole was a spirit, was he? Asha stored that away for later. 

“Ahh yes, glad to see that the vein of Andrastian bullshit that was our foundation is still going strong. I do so _hate_ it when an organisation deviates from its roots,” she replied with equal sobriety, attempting irreverent humour in the hope that it would make him relax a little. She watched him carefully, and was rewarded by a slight softening of his shoulders, a small, involuntary quirk to his mouth. 

“Can you truly blame them? They search desperately for some way to explain how you keep coming back to us,” Solas observed wryly, looking out into the darkness, “I can see why your good luck might lead some to believe in divinity. It seems like no one is as good at surviving as you.”

“If they’re looking for a god to blame for all of... this, the fault lies with Fen’Harel,” Asha said off-hand. Solas’ head snapped round, giving her a look of wide-eyed shock, and she shrugged at him, smiling and shaking her head, “not that they’d ever think of it, or ask, of course. But _he’s_ the one I prayed to, when I did the thing with the rift and my hand. You know-” she mimed the air-punch thing she did with every rift, “shooting blind, all ‘Slow Arrow’-like? I was winging it, but then it fucking worked! And then... I fell into that chasm. That really, really deep chasm. I’m just saying - he must really like me, and be _really, really bad_ at showing it.”

When she stopped talking, the oddest thing happened - Asha went through the foreign process of having to watch Solas _recover_ from something she’d said. She silently observed as he physically composed himself, which was somewhat fascinating. “So… so you believe in divine intervention, merely of a different kind?” he asked, carefully, but his voice… came close to shaking.

She let the silence drag out a beat longer than it needed to, just because she could. It was amusing to watch him squirm. “...Nah,” she grinned, nudging him to help the shock wear off, “not really. I didn’t get what I prayed for, anyway. I guess I am just _that good_ at surviving.”

It was pure bravado - she really didn’t understand exactly how she’d escaped that avalanche. She also wondered guiltily, as soon as the words left her mouth, if Solas knew what she’d been praying for - a glorious, meaningful death, a chance to prove her worth, and yes, maybe get a _little bit_ of rest. He remained standing stock-still, like her words had hit him hard.

“You… ok? I didn’t really think you were religious?” she said.

“I’m _not_ ,” he responded harshly. 

“Well, ok then.”

Asha fidgeted in the silence that followed. Her face felt tacky, and when she scratched her cheek her fingernail came back with a rust coloured crescent. Had no one _washed_ her? Gods, what did she even look like right now? Did she have any scars?

“Regardless of the source,” he said finally, when his voice was back to normal, “we should be glad that you continue to defy expectations. The humans have not raised one of our people so high for ages beyond counting. Their faith is hard won, _lethallan_ , that you continue to earn it is worthy of pride. I merely hope…”

“Solas, I really hope you are not going to go all cryptic on me. I am _tired_.”

“Then I shall speak plainly: the threat Corypheus wields, the orb he carried? It is elven. Ours.”

“Oh,” Asha didn’t think this much of a revelation: in her experience most fancy magic artefacts were. But then, she did suppose she said that as a Dalish elf who’d palled around with a mentor who loved delving into old ruins… “ _Oh._ That must’ve been why it looked so familiar to me!”

“This orb - Corypheus used it to open the Breach. Unlocking it must have caused the explosion that destroyed the Conclave. We must find out how he survived… and we must prepare for their reaction, when they learn the orb is of our people.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter all that much, does it?” she asked - not unreasonably, she thought. “It’s not like _Corypheus_ is an elf - he’s pretty obviously some kind of human. I mean, red-lyrium-weird-claw-fingered-giant-monster-type human, but he doesn’t have knife ears and I’m pretty sure that’s what counts.”

Solas gave her a flat look. Asha felt the need to continue, “Solas, I’m a _former tranquil_. Sometimes I wonder if they’ve even noticed all of the other... stuff. After all they've put up with from me, I really don’t see why they’re going to turn round and pull that particular bigotry card _now_.”

“Then you are far more trusting than I.”

“No, you’re not stupid. You wouldn’t worry without cause…” she worried her lip for a second, imagining another blissful twenty-four hours of unconsciousness somewhat wistfully, if only for the freedom it offered from responsibility. Then she sighed, “all right, lay it on me: what is it, and how do you know about it?”

“Such things were foci, said to channel power from our gods. Some were dedicated to specific members of our Pantheon -”

“Oooh, and this one’s Fen’Harel’s?” 

“I, excuse me -”

“You jumped out of your skin when I said his name. Or well, you came close, for you,” Asha said, and then gestured at him, “look, you’re doing it again! Had you already worked it out? Were you worried Corypheus said something to me?”

“I… had deduced that this might be one of the few possible sources of power big enough to form the Breach, but I was uncertain how he would have ever got a hold of such an object. All that remains are references in ruins, and faint visions of memories in the Fade, echoes of a dead empire. However Corypheus came to it, the orb is elven, and with it he threatens the heart of human faith.”

“Well then, we tell them everything. Maybe the 'heart of human faith' could stand a little threatening.”

Solas raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“Look, what do we achieve by keeping this a secret from the Inquisition? Does hiding the fact that the orb is elven paint us in a good light? Does it help? Knowing exactly what we’re up against will only help the Inquisition defeat him,” Asha sighed. “When I woke up, I told everyone the truth from the very beginning, and they treated me the better for it. I mean, yeah, I guess the alternative was that I was an accused murderer of hundreds, but still. I trust these people, and they trust me. _Because_ I didn’t tell them pretty lies. We can trust them to use this information against Corypheus, not us.”

“You make it sound like you’re staying.”

“ _Of course I’m staying_ ,” Asha replied, slightly scandalised that that wasn’t already a given. “Regardless of the fact that our main enemies are now apparently a rampant templar army-” _One that my templars are clearly a part of_ , she thought with a shudder, “- and that I don’t go killing myself for just anyone, you’re now telling me the Elder One desecrated an artefact of my gods and is going to try and fuck up the world with it. Why wouldn’t I try to stop him?”

“Don’t you worry that you’re asking too much of yourself?” he frowned, “Faith tends to make martyrs of its champions.”

“Yeah, no shit it does… but I’m not faithful, and I’m not a martyr either. You’re thinking in terms of the ‘cause’, not the Inquisition. Don’t go cheapening my friends, or my decision to stay behind at Haven, for that matter!” Asha snorted. “Yeah, I’ve made some pretty needlessly grandiose gestures, but these people joined because they cared about the world, and now they care about me too. I don’t want them to die, and they don’t want me to die, either. Do you think Varric, Bull, or _Sera_ cares if I throw myself at an arch demon? Cass apparently is actively trying to stop me. What about you, would you stop hanging out with me if I became less stupidly suicidal in the name of Andraste?”

“I’d actually rather prefer it if you stopped acting recklessly-”

“Exactly!” Asha lowered her voice, stepping slightly closer, “I didn’t ‘martyr’ myself against Corypheus to earn respect, Solas, or prove myself to be the Herald they all secretly want me to be. I did it because _it was the right thing to do_. And I’ll tell them about the orb, because that’s also the right thing to do. And how about this: I can say that Corypheus told me about the orb in the villainous monologue I so eloquently distracted him into giving, if you’re worried about how you having this information might make you look?”

Solas’ eyes softened slightly. “That is a kind offer, _lethallan_.”

“Not really. I’m just not scared of what they’ll say when I tell them. They’re not bad people,” Asha replied. “Well. Maybe Vivienne… but I’m actually pretty sure she’s just _Orlesian_.”

Solas barked a laugh, and Asha grinned at the sound, because that was exactly what she’d been going for. “I wish I shared your certainty, Asha. Whatever the case, that trust cannot grow in the wilderness. You will need every advantage-”

Asha left Solas by the veilfire, and walked back to the camp alone, with something of a plan. 

It was this kind of middle-management, bizarrely, that felt the closest to being back in Clan Lavellan. She remembered when, at sixteen, she was given her first proper ‘job’ as the First, as practice for when she led the Clan alone. Deshanna had asked her to mediate a dispute between a hunter and a craftsman who’d both wanted to take on the same teenager as an apprentice. Her ‘mediation’ had quickly devolved into her passing passive-aggressive messages between the two women, like they were the children in the scenario, when all that really needed to happen was for all three to sit down with each other and actually communicate. So much of leadership was making people who didn’t want to talk to each other get over it, or doing it for them if that failed.

It surprised her that Solas had shared his information only with her, rather than just taking it directly to the Inquisition’s leaders. He didn’t really seem like the type. But she guessed that she was probably the person he was closest to in the organisation and, on reflection, he was still a little aloof and distrustful of everyone else. She didn’t exactly know how she felt about that. 

No fights had erupted while they’d been away talking, which meant that it actually took some time to find the four people she needed to speak to. She found Cullen first, pulling him away from what appeared to be silent brooding with a hand on his arm, then Cass, and Leliana and finally Josephine - she felt a little bad about that, as the ambassador was asleep, and she guessed that women like Lady Montilyet didn’t fall asleep in bare-bone military camps all that easily. She drew them over to the fire, sat them down, fidgeted as she wondered where to start.

“Asha, you should rest,” Cass said, with measured, barely-there patience.

“Yeah well, I’ll rest when I’m… fast asleep in a nice warm bed somewhere that isn’t here,” Asha finished hastily, realising that it was probably too soon to be making ‘dead’ jokes. “So, um,” she shrugged awkwardly, then winced as she remembered she’d _fallen off a cliff_ in recent memory, “I’ve found out… some stuff that you should all know. Pretty sure that it’s important. And I think it might give us some idea of what we can do next.”

And then she proceeded to tell them everything: about the orb, about Corypheus, about the place called Skyhold that Solas had found in the Fade.

Well. Almost everything. The templar she'd seen at Haven... she kept _that_ monster a secret.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, I absolutely love making Solas panic. 
> 
> Is her utter lack of filter Asha's one true superpower? Probably not, given that she didn't realise that Solas knew all about the orb without her having said anything about what happened between her and Corypheus during their stand-off.
> 
> Can I just say that, pet peeve: that """argument""" the advisors have in the aftermath of Haven is perhaps my least favourite piece of dialogue from the entire game. That fight is over ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, it is blatantly just a bunch of meaningless statements said in an angry tone of voice to add drama. When I transcribed it to work off for this chapter, I was just like? These are just words??? Arranged into sentences???? BAD. WRITING.
> 
> Final author's note for the chapter: since my last update, I received a bunch of unexpectedly lovely comments!! I'm not going to lie, this week has been rough because I have the misfortune of living in a country that cares more about the economy than people's health in the coronavirus pandemic, and waking up to those comments gave me a reason to get out of bed when I was definitely in need of one. I'm so glad people are enjoying Asha's journey so far! 
> 
> Thank you everyone who's been reading this xxx


	32. Chapter Thirty-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, FINALLY, we're in Skyhold (sorry not sorry).

“Oh my gods it’s huge!” Asha cried out.

Just in case everyone hadn’t heard her the last thirty-one times.

Every time she had caught a glimpse of Skyhold - at the crest of a peak, in a dip between mountains - she had felt something clench in her chest, and she couldn’t help exclaiming over its awesome, looming presence. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, out of an ancient legend - the kind of castle that dragons guarded, that kings fought over. It also became an even more appealing destination with every night the Inquisition spent camping in foot deep snow, which soon proved enough to out-Dalish even her.

The day before, when Solas had gently led her up the mountainside and shown her the castle for the first time, it had stolen away her breath quicker than any frigid breeze. Solas hadn’t given her any clue what kind of scale they’d be working on - he’d only said that he knew Skyhold was ‘hidden’ and ‘protected’. She’d looked over at him, unable to keep the grin off her face, because she _understood_ what he’d given the Inquisition, with this. Permanence, and safety. He’d given them a home. And, well, some dramatic fucking architecture. Cullen was going to have a field day, with a fortress like that.

“I want to hug you,” she’d said at the time, blunt and slightly sleep-deprived after a week of relentless trekking. “Can I hug you?”

He’d looked kind of flustered at the idea - she couldn’t work out if that was because he was unused to people hugging him, or if he was unused to _her_ hugging him, specifically. But then she’d said, “come on Solas, a fucking _castle_? I’d hug you for a cottage, at this point.” and hugged him anyway.

Now they were walking up to the front gate, and the whole thing was just so daunting. Skyhold towered over them, like it had been built by giants who held a long-running, ruthless vendetta against dwarves. It was intimidating, and beautiful, and more than big enough to house the two hundred or so people who’d made it out of Haven alive. The portcullis was up and probably had been for centuries, leading into a small courtyard, and with an excited scream Asha couldn’t hold back any longer, she sprinted in through the door.

“I can’t believe we’re going to live in a castle!” she shrieked, spinning in a wild circle. She then glanced back at her party, arms still raised above her head.

“Undignified to the last,” observed Vivienne blandly.

“‘Member what I said about how you need to keep yourself grounded, yeah?” came Sera’s disgruntled voice, her face scrunched up against the sun as she entered Skyhold, looking thoroughly unimpressed. And then her and Vivienne shared a glance, somewhat horrified to find themselves agreeing on something.

“I thought you _liked_ camping, Flash. No buildings - isn’t that your whole thing?”

“Isn’t that a bit… racist?” Dorian remarked. “Against the Dalish. I ask this as the Tevinter in the mix, you understand.”

“Not in Asha’s case it isn’t. She even liked camping at the _Storm Coast_ ,” Cass said, shuddering at the memory.

“I seem to recall your disdain for ancient ruins as well, _lethallan_.”

“There is a distinct difference between visiting a damp ancient wreck covered in mould in some vague hope of finding enlightenment, and _living in a fucking castle!_ ” Asha had been aiming for prim retort, but that gleeful squeak came back into her voice near the sentence’s close. Skyhold was just wonderful. She looked up, craning her neck all the way back to see the castle rooftops. She felt the warm kiss of the sun on her face, filtering through the early spring blossoms starting to grow on the tree, “Come _on_ , guys, let me have this. It’s beautiful!”

In truth, she was mostly just trying to provoke a reaction. She knew everyone was tired and despondent - that tended to happen when everything you had was violently ripped away from you. She also knew everyone was studiously avoiding talking about the fact that she’d nearly died a week ago, and that the would-be death had been a willing one. Instead, they were all simply treating her like she was made of glass, and hoping she wouldn’t notice.

Well, everyone except Sera. Sera had come up to her on the first day of their trek north, asked if Asha was fully healed. When Asha had replied ‘yes’ - though she wasn’t, not really, everything still hurt - Sera had punched her in the face, before thoroughly telling her off for indulging in “all that hero bullshit.” 

And _then_ the rogue had announced that somehow, she’d saved Buttons from the wreck of Haven, before handing over the horse’s reins and storming off. Asha was touched, horrified, and frankly _impressed_ that her friend had managed to drag that poor horse all the way through a flaming village and a chantry basement for her - though Sera claimed to have been too drunk to remember how she did it.

Asha knew she’d have to talk to the Inquisition eventually, about why she’d been so eager to sacrifice herself. About Redcliffe. About… templars. She _knew_ Cassandra was just waiting for the prime moment to sit her down and lecture her for hours about the inherent value of mortal lives. But right now, after a week of silent trudging, she just wanted to distract herself with the fact that they were... _living in a castle!_

While the others groaned and muttered about blisters and discussed the logistics of setting up tents in the courtyard, Asha raced up the aged flights of steps, ignoring the huge doors to the main building that she knew she wouldn’t be able to open on her own, and ran to another set of steps that climbed higher still, up to the castle walls. Winded, she ran to the edge, leaning over and looking out on the Frostback Mountains.

“Beautiful,” she whispered again, and the word was lost to the harsh wind that buffeted her face. The view of the mountains around was stunning, and nearly blinding to look at. The snow was thick and pristine, reflecting the sun back at her in a fierce glare, and when she looked down her stomach bottomed out of her as she imagined falling onto the unforgiving rocks below. Everything was just so… vast. She had finally found a building that didn’t make her feel trapped - the ancient vines that twisted along the stonework, the howling, chill winds and the huge trees growing in the bright sunlight all made the place feel half-wild.

That wildness continued inside, when everyone finally caught up and Cullen’s soldiers winched the doors open, to reveal a mouldering, dishevelled ruin, every piece of furniture that wasn’t termite-ridden or rotting to nothing in damp still blanketed under inches of dust. Those first few days were like camping in a ruin just as Deshanna had done, for none of the bedrooms and very few of the actual beds were serviceable. Everyone just had to lay out their pallets wherever there was room - except for Lady Vivienne, of course, who somehow arranged all of the viable furniture in this massive building into a serviceable salon for herself within the day. 

Asha spent half of her time moving furniture and detritus with everyone else, and the other half exploring the labyrinthine tunnels and stairways that made up the castle, until her clothes were filthy and she was pretty certain any rips in the fabric became inadvertently sealed over with all the cobwebs she kept walking through. Dorian said that Skyhold was like a puzzle box, so much bigger than you imagined even from its grand exterior, and Asha couldn’t help but agree. Three times, she forgot there was a second garden, and how the fuck to get there. Her favourite room was in the basement - a disused forge carved out of the bare rock with only three walls, the fourth bare and exposed to the elements with a sheer drop to granite shards below. She’d considered sleeping down there, briefly, but even she had to admit that it was fucking freezing the moment the sun dipped below the horizon.

Once enough bunkrooms were cleared out for Skyhold’s inhabitants to sleep in, the first rooms to be established were Josephine’s study - because that’s where the fat accountancy tomes that kept the Inquisition alive and breathing also needed to live - the kitchens, and the tavern. The latter was mostly because Bull’s Chargers had dedicated their full force to that particular excavation, after having discovered an entirely functional cellar filled to the brim with age-old elvish wine. Dorian had taken one look at the tower that housed the library, and dropped all practical tasks that involved ‘too much manual labour’, in favour of cataloguing the shelves upon shelves of books. And Cullen had claimed his office somewhat bashfully, as if he was worried he wasn’t important enough to warrant one, which meant that the similar office space behind Josie’s study became the new war room, though they were yet to salvage a functional table from another wing.

Asha supposed she should’ve had some inkling that something was amiss when Cullen approached her about it, awkwardly, as she helped clear out the main hall, dismantling the pieces of mangled furniture to create enough firewood to last them a year. “I was, er, thinking of lodging myself in the tower by the entrance,” he told her as she paused to take a drink, his eyes planted firmly on the stonework _behind_ her head, which she might’ve been offended by if it had been anyone but Cullen. “It is by the entrance - um, obviously - and so provides clear visuals of the approach, but also has three direct lines of communication for guard reports. You can easily reach the courtyard where we’ll be meeting and testing recruits, and that tower I know Leliana is considering as a rookery for her ravens.” 

“Ok, that sounds… good?” she said, uncertain why he had come to her, specifically, with this information. “I guess check with Leliana? Or Cass, maybe. Does Cass need an office?” Cass didn’t seem like the kind of person who needed an office, but then she still wasn’t entirely sure what the Right Hand of the Divine did, other than ‘not spy stuff’.

“Well, I just wanted to make sure you approved… I mean, in case you wanted it -”

“- why would _I_ need an office?” she asked, genuinely surprised by the offer. “I’m fine with the bunk rooms, honestly.”

“Oh yes, I, err- thank you.”

“Good talk.” Varric said, as needless commentary when Cullen left, from his place by an old fireplace that was covered in an age of soot. Asha stuck her tongue out at him and returned to her task.

At the time, she didn’t wonder why the Commander had come to her with a decision relating to the Inquisition. Cullen _always_ talked about the Inquisition, and everything between them was awkward, since she’d decided to focus her energies on the templars that were actually killing her rather than the one who’d seemed to feel somewhat guilty about sending her to her death. She wasn’t sure they’d attempted an actual conversation that wasn’t about work yet, and she certainly wasn’t going to be the one to initiate it.

So she kept clearing out rooms - not so they were clean, because they didn’t have the money for that yet, but so they were serviceable - watching the numbers in the makeshift dorms dwindle as people found their places within the castle. Sera claimed a room in the tavern that she offered to let Asha share, but Asha soon found that there were at least a couple of evenings a week when she liked to be asleep before three in the morning, and everyone else was still celebrating their successful escape from Haven with fervour and elvish wine. She felt a little lonely with Sera gone, but found that the work on Skyhold had the same effect of being out in the Hinterlands - she was nearly always passed out the moment her head hit the pillow. And she had mastered the art of waking silently from nightmares, so she didn’t disturb any bunkroom acquaintances.

The next time she noticed anything was different was when she finally found the perfect war room table, clearing out the final unexplored tower in the castle. It was a huge, mahogany monstrosity, as long as Asha was tall, and she surveyed it proudly like it was an animal she’d found and killed on a hunt. It was also at the opposite end of the fortress to the war room, so she enlisted Blackwall and Bull to transport it for her, while she assigned herself the role of ‘door opener’, guiding them up and down Skyhold's many, many stairs.

“Almost there!” she said, as she kicked the second antechamber door open with her back foot and Bull caught the first door she’d been holding with his shoulder and a short grunt. When she blundered through the door to Josephine’s office, she saw the ambassador and the three people standing around her desk startle. Cullen, Cass, Leliana and Josie were all in a meeting, a parchment document on the table between them, and they all looked like startled prey when they saw Asha enter. She would've felt bad for interrupting, if they all hadn’t looked so guilty. 

“Oh gods, sorry - don’t mind me!” she said, standing to the side to let Blackwall and Bull through. “I found a war table! Blackwall offered to sand and varnish it down - do we need that? I wasn’t sure, given that it’ll be covered over and we,” and by ‘we’ she meant ‘Leliana’, “often stab it? With knives?”

“Varnishing would be lovely,” Josie said with a gentle smile.

“Ah, Lady Herald, do you need help?” Cullen’s first instinct, it seemed, was to gravitate towards the manual labour task in front of him.

“Oh _I’m_ fine,” Asha turned sweetly to Blackwall and Bull, batting her eyelashes, “what about you, boys? Do you need any help? Do you think those big strong arms of yours can last the last fifty meters?”

“You are lucky I think the things I do about redheads, boss,” grunted Bull, while Blackwall just silently raised a single eyebrow. She laughed, ushering them both through the next set of doors with a theatrical flourish.

“Sorry! Carry on!” she grinned at the Inquisition’s leadership, then let the door shut behind her. She tried to keep that grin pinned on her face, like she was oblivious to the fact that she had just caught them talking about her. She wasn’t exactly hurt to be left out of an Inquisition meeting - that was hypocritical, given how many she'd skived off from, back in Haven. But she was worried about what they could’ve been saying about her to make them seem so horrified by her sudden appearance. No one looked like that when they were praising your hair, or your conversational prowess. Maybe they were unpicking her motivations for Haven, or maybe they were quietly discussing whether or not she should be put out to pasture now that she and the anchor had done their bit for the Breach. If they were, she’d much rather they’d allowed her to be present for it. She knew that people were probably talking about her behind her back - she was the Herald of Andraste, her life was basically being discussed by everyone but her right now - but she hated to see it happen right in front of her eyes.

She distracted herself with gardening, of all things. That was the next job on the list, apparently, when she asked a random person who looked vaguely important what still needed doing, and they answered. Asha loved how overgrown and wild the gardens were, but even she could see merit in being able to walk across the lawn without becoming enmeshed and mangled in brambles, and for Adan to be able to start planting medicinal herbs. She couldn’t help but imagine how fucking smug Deshanna would be to see her on her knees in the dirt, _weeding_. This was just the kind of manual labour her keeper would’ve said made her ‘humble’. Asha hated every second of it - her back hurt, her fingers were covered in thistle stings, and sweat kept getting in her eyes. On the third day, she rocked up to the tavern with every limb aching - just as much as when she fell through the Haven caverns, she was _absolutely_ certain - and announced to Sera, “I’m not Dalish enough for this shit. I’ve out-elfed myself. Gardening is just fucking awful.”

“Quit, then,” Sera replied, simply.

“No, I can’t. I’m almost done,” she sighed, wondering what the next job would end up being. Hopefully one involving less nettles.

“I agree with her, Flash,” Varric said, sending an ale down the table towards her, “you need to just _stop_.”

“Excuse me?”

“You already died for the Inquisition, we get it! You’re very, very committed to the cause. It’s admirable - you’re putting us all to shame. But you do notice how Bull isn’t cleaning out any more taverns, since he got his men lodged? How Cass is beginning her training routines again? How I am holed up here, on my ass, enjoying the fruits of our labours like a sane person?”

“I don’t… understand.”

“You might be special, but fact is we _all_ nearly died in Haven. That was only two weeks ago. It is not _your job_ to make sure Skyhold is perfect for everyone a fortnight after you save all their lives,” he told her gently, “I have it on good authority that Ruffles will in fact be hiring someone to do that very thing for us.”

“Well, she doesn’t need to pay anyone,” Asha looked down to her cup, mumbling, “it’s not like I’m busy - I’m not like Cass or Bull, I don’t have a job to do -”

“What you need to do is: relax! For the sake of us all, _please stop_. You’re making us look bad! This was supposed to be your rest time to allow you to recover from, y’know, _almost dying_. Just get drunk, maybe read a book, I’m sure you’ll be putting us all to shame with your heroism within the month...”

Asha thought about contradicting him, pointing out that she didn’t really have a use now that they had the mages in hand and the Breach under control. That she hadn’t been invited to a meeting since they arrived, and that they probably wouldn’t want her because where once she was disinterested, now she was a liability. 

But that sounded horribly self-pitying even to her own ears, so instead she followed his first instruction, and began downing her wine with fierce vigour.

The next morning, she peeled herself out of her cot with a brutal headache and a number of weeding-related pains. _No gardening_ , she thought to herself, as she went to the heated baths they’d uncovered in their mapping of the basement to try and fix at least one of those problems. The baths had been Lady Vivienne’s renovation priority, and the First Enchanter and her entourage had figured out and managed to fix the arcane mechanisms which powered them in under three days. Asha thought it might be the first thing she felt thankful to Madame de Fer for. Honestly, she was surprised the woman would even deign to consider the idea of a public bath. Asha herself had to take hers with yesterday’s vest still on, fearful of someone catching a glimpse of her brand in the open space.

Freshly washed and slightly less disgusting, she climbed her way out of the basement, intent on doing something 'relaxing', though she wasn’t quite sure what. She walked out into the courtyard, squinting against the sunlight, and saw the four Inquisition leaders once more clustered together. She tried not to let her stomach sink at the sight. It was fine, they would call on her if they needed her. She pinned her eyes elsewhere and began moving towards the stables.

“Asha!” Asha turned to see Cass had raised her hand at her, beckoning her over.

Confused, Asha walked to them, raking a hand through her still damp hair. Both Leliana and Josie were watching her with smiles on their faces, and Leliana’s smile wasn’t her stabby one either, but something genuine and soft. And Cullen, well, Cullen just looked awkward, like he always did, his cheeks slightly pinked.

“That’s… a lot of freckles,” he muttered, seemingly to the air.

“Oh my gods!” Asha put her hand to her cheeks. Skyhold was extremely lacking in mirrors right now - she hadn’t seen her face in weeks. She grinned, delighted, “did they finally start coming back in? I _knew_ gardening must be good for something!”

“Oh, I -”

“I don’t think the Commander meant to say that out loud,” Leliana said, with obvious amusement at Cullen’s expense. _Probably not good to accidentally blurt out comments on other people’s appearances, when they’ve only started to treat you cordially,_ Asha reasoned. He was lucky that she fucking loved everything about her freckles.

“What did you want to talk to me about?” she asked. “Do you need something done?”

“Of a fashion,” Cass replied, “come with us.”

The four of them led her to Cass’ lodgings, to speak in private. _This is it,_ Asha thought. They were going to let her down gently, and put her firmly in her meaningless figurehead place. 

Oh well, at least she lived in a castle.

All four of them were watching her expectantly, although she was the one who was waiting for them to speak. “There’s something we were hoping to discuss with you,” Cassandra said.

“...Ok?”

“The Elder One - Corypheus - is so much more than we could’ve ever imagined. We have the walls and numbers to put up a fight here, thanks to you,” Cullen began, “but we’re going to have to change our structure and strategy accordingly, to deal with a new threat on this type of scale.” 

There was another awkward pause.

“We know that… that things have been hard for you. Since Redcliffe. Perhaps before then, since you helped us first close the Breach,” the Seeker said haltingly, “you’ve done so much for us. We hate to ask for more.”

They were really going to let her down gently, weren’t there? They’d decided she was too weak to continue playing a real role in the Inquisition. Asha couldn’t help but wince a little, and told herself not to cry. It would be unseemly to cry, like a child throwing a tantrum over a toy they hadn’t even wanted in the first place.

“But… we feel like we might have to,” Cullen muttered.

Asha’s head snapped up, confused. “Excuse me?”

“The Inquisition needs a leader,” Leliana continued. “We’ve discussed our options, extensively. We think it should be you.”

“Me?”

“You are the one who has already been leading us,” Cass replied firmly, noticing the high-pitched squeak in Asha’s voice. “Your decisions let us heal the sky. You single-handedly bought the mages on-side. Your determination bought us out of Haven. You are the creature’s rival because of what you did. And we know it. All of us.”

“I didn’t - I’m not - I can’t be qualified - I miss _every meeting_ -”

“Yes, you would probably have to be a little more present in the day-to-day running of things,” Josie smiled. “The meetings can be quite long, but they’re not too arduous, I promise you. I can bring tea?”

“It would be asking a lot of you, more than you might be willing to give,” Cass said.

“But I’m… me?” Asha realised she wasn’t making particular sense, then rallied, “All those decisions, they were just ones I made in the moment. It was pure _luck_ they even worked out.”

“It wasn’t luck,” Cullen scoffed, “no one is that ‘lucky’, I’m sure you realise. It’s a skill to make tough calls at a moment’s notice without input, and yours were in the places where it mattered, when our own answers were insufficient. We would’ve bided our time with Redcliffe, for weeks. I would’ve sacrificed everyone at Haven because I thought it was our only option. I can understand why you might not want to job, why you might not want to work closely with us,” _and by ‘us’ he means ‘him’,_ Asha thought, “but it was felt that we could not, in good conscience, consider any other candidates for leadership without asking you first. You were our first choice - you get the first chance of refusal.”

“But - you can’t need me. You been discussing all _this_... this future stuff without me…”

“Yes, while you were single-handedly renovating half the castle, unasked,” Cullen said dryly.

“We wanted to give you some space to breathe,” Cass amended.

“You’d really… you’d really consider giving me this? The Inquisition? I’m -” _a reckless person who is ruled by emotion who may have accidentally done blood magic,_ “a mage. A tranquil mage? That’s a pretty… divisive… decision. Vivienne will have an aneurysm.”

“With the Order reduced to a murderous band of red lyrium monsters, I’m not sure us being ‘divisive’ matters,” Cass replied. “We’re not choosing a mage. We’re choosing you.”

“I happen to be a very mage-y mage. I don't believe in Andraste!"

“We are not pretending it will not be difficult,” the Seeker said, “And we know that this is not what you signed up for. I will not pretend no one will object to our choice, but I must confess, we don’t particularly care. You’re who we want. There would be no Inquisition without you.”

“I mean, there obviously _would_ be-”

“We would not have survived Haven,” Leliana cut her off, in the tone that brokered no argument. “...We might not even have survived the Breach.”

Asha opened her mouth to retort, then closed it again. Modesty could only get a person so far before it became annoying for everyone involved. They clearly hadn’t made their decision lightly, and now that they’d said their piece, it was up to her to actually give it proper consideration. 

Did she want to be the leader of the Inquisition? She knew one thing was certain: she wanted a _job_ , and actually, she wanted an important one. At the idea of having no purpose, she’d been growing more and more restless, with only her thoughts for company. She wanted to continue feeling useful. This wasn’t the role she imagined, and it was certainly daunting, but who else was there? Everyone else in this room. And they were all looking at _her_. 

It would… it would be like being Clan Lavellan’s First.

After what was probably a minute of silent contemplation, she bit her lip. “You guys… would still be here, right?”

“You think Josie would let you loose on the nobility without her help?” Cass asked incredulously. 

“Cassandra!” Josephine chided, though she did not directly contradict the Seeker’s statement.

“We would be present in an… advisory role,” Cullen explained.

“And… can I... delegate?”

“You can delegate.”

“Oh, thank the fucking gods.” Asha huffed out a sigh. “Military defense scares me. Noble treaties scare me. Spy network micromanagement fucking _terrifies_ me.”

“We’d be more than ready to help you, but it would be you who offers the final word,” he confirmed.

That didn’t make it sound any less daunting. Asha bit her lip, “you’d still need to tell me if I’m being an idiot, ok? I’ll probably almost definitely be an idiot at some point.”

“Gladly,” Leliana replied with a smile.

“And you can stay here, if you want to,” Josie rushed to reassure her, “we are much safer here in Skyhold, there’s no need for you to go into the field -”

“I _like_ being in the field,” Asha mumbled.

“Even better,” Leliana was full-on grinning now.

“A leader who gets their hands dirty,” Cassandra said with a small knowing smile, “you’ve won over half the Inquisition in the last week alone - the half that were not won over already by the fact you single-handedly faced down our enemy to protect us.”

“Stop making it sound so… so... valiant! It was stupid! I just shouted ‘fuck off’ in his face, and then I snot cried!”

“Yes, well, very few people in this world would walk into a warzone alone to tell a darkspawn magister to ‘fuck off’,” Cullen admitted, somewhat awkwardly, “...we rather think that’s one of your primary qualifications.”

Asha blinked at him, and snorted out an incredulous, delighted laugh, “ _that’s_ the primary qualification? Give it to Sera, then!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first two lines of this chapter are not a dick joke, but are in fact me poking fun at my own stupid wordcount.
> 
> This was my attempt at a breather chapter, guys, after the plot intense stuff of the last four or so chapters. I'm so bad at fluff that I have no idea if I did it right - for one thing, there was still an edge of angst in here, so clearly 'light-hearted' is not my brand.
> 
> Author's note: I have no idea how Sera saved the horse (though Sera does, as she was NOT drunk when she got it out of Haven, like she tells Asha she was). I mostly just realised that I'd named my Inquisitor's damn horse Buttons, and that meant there was no fucking way I was going to let it die.
> 
> I'm really, really excited for next week's update: spoilers, it involves Asha getting drunk again. See you then xxx


	33. Chapter Thirty-Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inquisitor Lavellan is born!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: alcohol

Asha accepted, then regretted it immediately after.

The ceremony took place the next morning. Asha was glad that they’d given her time to acclimatise to the idea, but it made for a very sleepless night as she began to imagine all the ways she could monumentally fuck up.

It also proved to be just enough time for the unannounced news to reach Vivienne, via what Asha assumed was a nefarious gossip network. Asha was woken up when one of Madame de Fer’s servants bought her an outfit directly from the First Enchanter’s trousseau, with a cuttingly polite note imploring her to wear it. Which meant that Asha chose a sapphire blue shirt and some plain trousers she’d found in the Inquisition’s stores, knowing that it would signal to the First Encahnter that her friendly advice - along with the awful robe and silly hat that she guessed was a leftover of some very expensive but also incredibly political Circle garb - had been firmly disregarded.

She walked through Skyhold towards her meeting place with Cassandra, conscious of what the empty, cavernous quality to the halls and corridors might mean. “This is stupid, this is so stupid,” she chanted to herself, a hard pit of nerves churning in her stomach. 

It wasn’t that she entirely disagreed with their assessment that she was already the unofficial leader of the Inquisition - she had to admit a lot of their path in the last few month’s had been determined by her own actions. 

It was more the fact that they wanted to _keep her_. She’d been there for those actions. While they had had some improbably successful results, she wasn’t sure how much they actually recommended her skills as a decision maker.

But at the same time: Leliana had wanted to kill off her traitor rather than face the flaws in her system of governance. Cullen had wanted to kill off all of Haven in one glorious sacrifice. Cass had, as Asha was fond of reminding her, thrown her prime suspect for causing the Breach directly _at the Breach_ in the hope the two things would somehow cancel each other out.

Josephine was perfect, obviously. But Asha was also pretty certain that the ambassador vomited at the sight of blood.

At least they could pass her actions off as the will of Andraste, which was a pretty watertight fall-back for when she... inevitably fucked up.

“Oh shit, oh shit,” she wheezed, wiping clammy, gross hands on her thighs as she stepped outside. She saw Cassandra up ahead, looking far more like a leader than she ever would in her emblazoned armour. Her entire body felt a little numb with terror as she walked forward on weak, shaky knees. “Are you ready?” Cass asked gently.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Asha blurted in response.

“This can’t be worse than facing down an army of templars, surely?”

“You do realise that after I do this, I’ll _still_ be facing down an army of templars?” 

“You know everyone here,” Cass reminded her, placing a hand on her back to guide her forward, “and all of them owe you their lives. If anyone stands against you, they’re fools.”

Her friend’s fierceness coaxed a weak smile out of her. It was enough to help her climb the steps, but Asha’s stomach fully swooped out from under her when she saw the large crowd of people watching from below.

“I don’t… fuck… can I do this?” She supposed it was a bad time to be asking that question.

“I believe you can,” Cassandra murmured back. But that was easy for Cassandra to say. The Seeker still believed that Asha was the Herald of Andraste, even though she never said it to her face anymore. It was seeing Leliana - holding out that stupid, wicked heavy and overly shiny looking sword, that Asha had never seen before and guessed she would never see again - that gave Asha the confidence to keep walking forward. Leliana’s motives were ones she understood: practical, cynically analytical, slightly mercenary. Asha wouldn’t be here if Leliana didn’t think she had some kind of value at the head of the Inquisition.

“We trust your judgement,” Cass said, leading her over, “Remember: there would be no Inquisition without you.”

As Asha eyed the sword distrustfully. She could practically feel everyone’s anticipation, the whole of Skyhold holding its breath. With shaking hands and a sick stomach, she reached over, hefted the blade with a small, unladylike grunt. It was _heavy_. “Do I have to give a speech?” she hissed over at Leliana. The Nightingale cocked an amused eyebrow, and gave a silent nod.

As she lifted the sword in front of her, she heard a whoop from somewhere in the crowd - then a spattering of applause, and a single heckle, which sounded a little like “show us yer tits!”. Asha smiled. Well, at least Sera wasn’t expecting anything fancy.

“Hi,” she said, then swallowed, realising how far away everyone was, and spoke louder, “hi! You all probably know me, as Ashatarsylnin Lavellan, or… as the Herald of Andraste, which is the name you have given me, and one I often wonder if I can live up to."

Below her, her vision started to focus in on faces she recognised: Dorian, in an absurdly coloured set of clothes that told her he'd also probably heard the news ahead of time and had known he was dressing for an occasion; Bull and his Chargers, already with drinks in hands; Josephine and Cullen, both smiling up at her. She felt her voice steady, as she continued.

“I don’t claim to be the bravest or the strongest person here - anyone who’s witnessed my morning training can attest to that.” A smattering of polite laughter, but then it was the kind of joke you put in speeches - just amusing enough to maybe earn a smile. “More than anything, I’m simply the person you’ve chosen to put your faith in. And although I’ll probably forever question whether or not I deserve it, I want to take this moment to thank you for trusting me. That’s... all I really wanted to say. We have an enemy, and we have to stand together to defeat it. I’ll strive every day to do what is right, and I hope that, at least in that regard, you can follow my lead. The Inquisition will fight for all of us, because it has to.

“At the end of the day, I don’t think Corypheus cares if I’m the Herald of Andraste or not. But he cares that we stand in his way, and that we will keep fighting him until his vision for our future is foiled and his plans lie in tatters.” When Asha stopped, swallowing against a dry throat, she couldn’t think of anything else to say. “So, um... yeah.” She gave a nervous glance back to Cassandra, who was smiling in a way that told her her speech hadn’t been _entirely_ terrible. 

The Seeker stepped forward, and said, in a general’s bellow: “Have our people been told?”

Josie’s lilting voice rose up from the courtyard, “They have. And soon, the world.”

“Commander, will they follow?”

“Inquisition - will you follow? Will you fight? Will we triumph?” The Commander’s voice, then impossibly loud cheers. Asha’s arm began to tremble with the weight of the bloody ceremonial sword. “Your leader! Your Herald! Your Inquisitor!”

And although Asha kind of just stood there, feeling a little like a prop as the roar of voices crashed over her, even she could admit that something about the whole thing made her tear up a little. Even if she tried to tell herself that they weren’t cheering for her, but some idea of her they needed to believe in to survive, they were still _cheers_. Their voices felt reassuring, tangibly charged with hope. 

Even if she, Inquisitor Lavellan, had no idea what to do next.

Varric’s answer, of course, was to get drunk.

Asha knew, abstractly, that Varric was wealthy. But the knowledge took on a whole new context when she learned that he had supplied all of the alcohol for the party celebrating both her new Inquisitor status, and the official opening of Skyhold's tavern, The Herald's Rest. It meant they wouldn’t plunder any more of the priceless, ancient, and slightly vinegar-y wine.

No, instead she had ale to chug with Bull, trying to drain it to the dregs in what she thought was a rather unfair race - although bringing up the respective size of their mouths ended up with an innuendo-laden conversation that turned her crimson. She had a glass of Antivan wine to sip while she watched Dorian and Vivienne have a terse conversation about apprentice magic techniques, that was basically the verbal equivalent of two cats circling each other and spitting in an alley. She had shots of clear spirit to do with Sera, over a game of ‘I have never’, in which every single one of Sera’s claims were: “I have never tried killing myself”, “I have never thrown myself pointlessly at Coryphetits”, “I have never abandoned my friends ‘cuz I felt like being a poncy hero”.

“Why'd you do… all this?” she asked Varric when she finally got the chance to sit down with him, gesturing at the press of bodies. Revellers, whose tankards were all filled to the brim, filled the tavern to bursting, spilling out onto the courtyard.

Varric shrugged, somewhat uncomfortably. “I guess I just thought some of us could use some liquid courage tonight, is all,” he said, carefully. Asha was not quite drunk enough to miss the way his eyes flickered over to Cassandra, sat over at a table with Cullen and Josephine with a bottle of red wine between them.

“Ahh,” she nodded sagely, already imagining all of their beautiful, tanned, stocky future children. “You’re finally going to tell her how you feel, after the perils of a near-death experience put it all into perspective.”

Varric gave her a confused, and then amused, look. “Well, I’m certainly going to tell her... something,” he replied, and the thought alone seemed to require him chugging half his own drink, “and then I got a feeling she’s going to tell me how _she_ feels. Probably violently. With her sword.”

_Kinky_ , Asha thought, and it turned out she was just drunk _enough_ because she said, aloud, “kinky.”

“You’re cute, Flash,” he grinned, though even she could tell it was a little pained and nervous, “let’s just say that I need to be slightly tipsier before I face another near-death experience that will put even Haven to shame.”

“Whatever you tell her, I’m sure it will be fine,” she smiled, “Cassandra _loooooooves_ you.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he muttered. Then smirked at her, “so, how’s it feel, _Inquisitor_?”

“Booo!” Asha took a mouthful of her whiskey, having agreed with Varric to do so every time someone addressed her by her newly acquired title. Which had been a lot, given this was a party celebrating _her_. “Mostly it feels like… being drunk.”

“Following the Hawke brand of leadership, I see.”

“I thought Hawke was like... a champion? Did that involve much leading? I thought it was more...” Asha pantomimed stabbing the Arishok, and then the Arishok dying.

“Hawke did a lot for Kirkwall from the sidelines, which was sometimes all there was when the leadership of the city failed,” Varric said. “Too much - she gave too much of herself up in the process. You’re lucky: you have people on hand, an _infrastructure_. Hawke mostly just plied city guards with free drinks she couldn’t afford to get them to do what she wanted, and then waded into the fray when they didn’t. You’ve got _experts_.”

“Aww, don’t sell yourself short,” she snickered at her accidental pun, then nudged Varric’s shoulder, “Hawke had you.”

“ _You_ have me!”

Asha grinned. “I just hope being surrounded by ‘experts’ doesn’t simply show me up as incompetent.”

“They all love you, Flash.”

“Sure they do,” Asha’s thoughts flashed to Cullen, making her voice incredulous. She definitely had Cass on side, Leliana hadn’t stabbed her - which she frankly took as a ringing endorsement - and Josie was as lovely to her as she was to everybody. She had no idea what the Commander thought about her these days, however.

“They do. If you, you know, tried talking to them-”

“I do talk to them.”

“If you tried, you know, talking to them like they were human beings…” Varric gave her a significant look, and she suddenly realised: this conversation had a point.

“You want something from me, you asshole,” she said, giving him an accusing glare.

“I merely wanted to note, as the former-professional member of a dysfunctional group tasked with the safety of the people, that you _might_ want to bury the hatchet with the man who looks after the army you now own.”

“I!” Asha fumed, “you! I - for all you know - I already have! Why are you-”

“If Curly ran the kitchens, I probably wouldn’t be saying anything, but the three battles we’ve fought have all ended with you lone-wolfing it into the middle of suicidal situations,” Varric said, “I just figure that talking to the guy who runs the military that’s supposed to protect you from shit will maybe stop that from happening.”

“I trust the Commander to look after the army! What the fuck would I do with an army?”

“Kind of proving my point, Flash. Lots of things, if you’re now the... Inquisitor.”

Asha glared at him, taking the required sip of her drink. “We don’t need to be _friends_.”

“But you do kind of need to be able to work together.”

“We will be able to work together.”

“You guys can barely manage full sentences around each other!”

“That is… not true.”

Varric gave her a knowing look. “Sure it isn’t. I just think you should maybe reach out and open the lines of communication.”

“Why does that fall to me?” Asha said angrily, “It’s not my job to make him feel comfortable - you realise this? em>He’s the templar, he should be the one making me feel comfortable. _He_ can reach out to _me_.”

“Has Curly ever actually been… mean to you, Flash? Seems like the kind of thing the Nightingale would have his balls for, if he was.”

Asha took a long drink, and thought back over the history of her very pointedly distant acquaintance with Cullen Rutherford. Apart from that terrible, catastrophically stupid first meeting, he’d actually not been horrible to her. He’d honoured all the terms she’d set out in her agreement with Leliana to the letter. He’d not been rude to her, at any point, apart from maybe a slightly unnecessary jibe at her disaster of a sex life, which she was pretty sure had been meant as a joke. The templar who _had_ said horrible things to her had been kicked out of the Inquisition for it, by him. Even when he’d asked her if she feared demonic possession at Redcliffe, which had been one of the scariest questions of her life, it had been with all the... careful civility of a doctor check-up. 

“Nooooo,” she said warily, not liking where this was going, “he’s not been mean to me. He’s been… very polite. But he has to be: he’s a _templar_.”

“ _Ex_ -templar. And what does that have to do with anything?”

Asha glared at Varric, for asking such a dumb question. It had everything to do with _everything_. Instead, she muttered into her glass, “if he wasn't polite to me, I’d kill him.”

Varric chuckled. “So, possibly out of common courtesy, possibly out of fear for his life, Curly’s tried to be nice to you, but from the sounds of things he’s still really, _really_ bad at getting people to like him.” Then, he gave her a look, “you, on the other hand, are very nice and very, very good at getting people to like you. I think you should at least give him a helping hand. It’s cruel to just watch him suffer.”

“I’m not nice,” Asha mumbled, “I mean, look at all the brandy I’ve stolen from Vivienne-”

“I can’t hear you over the title you took in an organisation related to a religion you don’t believe in, all because the Seeker said please, _Inquisitor_.”

Asha took another sip, glaring at him all the while.

“You guys are going to be working pretty closely together,” Varric said, far too sensibly, “I just think that maybe, _maybe_ you should give him a chance. To protect both your interests. It’s gonna be awkward when you, Ruffles, Nightingale and the Seeker are like, guests of honour at each other’s weddings, ten years down the line, and Curly’s all alone in the corner.”

“Well, there might not _be_ any weddings. We might all be dead by then,” Asha replied primly. In truth, she was a little offended by the assumption that it would take her _ten years_ to find a spouse. Although apparently it had taken Hawke seven years to finally jump her girlfriend’s bones in a romantic way, from the way Varric told it, so maybe that was just the sort of timeline he was used to.

“Just… give it a go? There’s nothing like a common cause to unite people,” Varric sighed, “I ran with a blood mage, an abomination, and a self-proclaimed ‘mage killer’. And by the end, they were so cute together. Like siblings. Or an old bickering married… throuple. It was endearing.”

“I don’t want to ‘endearingly bicker’ with Cullen Rutherford,” Asha replied. “And didn’t that abomination end up destroying all of Kirkwall?” _Not that I really blame him..._

“Please, Flash, can you try?” Varric met her eyes with this ‘this is important to me’ type expression that he knew was her weakness, because she was ‘nice’, “All you have to do is have one cordial conversation in which you don’t stare daggers at him. For the sake of all of Thedas.”

“The world isn’t going to end if I don’t talk to him.”

“It’s not like I’m asking you to be best friends. I just think it might… you know. Help?”

“But… but... talking to people is _hard_ ,” she moaned weakly, putting her head down on the table.

Varric cast her an amused glance, then looked at her drink, then back at her. He cocked a single, incredulous eyebrow. Asha felt, in a word, _seen_. 

“Fine,” she muttered, “I’ll have three more drinks-”

“- And then you won’t be able to shut up.”

“And then I won’t be able to shut up.”

“Inquisitor.”

Asha finished her drink and slammed it down on the table. “Fuck you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise that Varric does have a legit agenda here, he is not (solely) a convenient plot device!
> 
> I hope it wasn't too cheesy to include the Inquisitor's speech in this fic. I did consider skipping it but man do I love that moment in Inquisition when all the music swells and it feels like some proper high fantasy shit. Anyway long story short it means this chapter became huge and I had to split it into two, which is why I now leave you with a such a cruel cliffhanger...


	34. Chapter Thirty-Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A drunk Asha Lavellan tries to befriend Cullen Rutherford.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: alcohol

It ended up being four drinks, just to spite him.

And also because Josephine came over to talk to her about the upcoming meetings and appointments she would have now that she was the Inquisitor. With Varric sat right next to her with his smug, shit-eating grin, Asha still had to surreptitiously drink every time the Ambassador said ‘Inquisitor’. Josie was, by her very nature, incredibly respectful of titles.

So it wasn’t until Cullen got up from his chair to leave - which was ridiculous, because no one else was leaving, and Asha was _pretty sure_ it was still relatively early, regardless of how shitfaced certain people might be - that she remembered her promise. Bolting from her stool, she hurried over to intercept him at the door, placing a hand on his arm to stop his progress. She almost tripped over a bar patron in her haste, but the most important thing was she made it in time.

“NowaitIstillhave to be nice to you!” she blurted, before feeling instant regret.

Cullen blinked and looked down at her, obviously confused by her outburst. “I, err - excuse me?”

Asha looked over at Varric, who was giving her an enthusiastic thumbs up. “Weeee work together now,” she said, scrabbling to recall the pep talk she’d received earlier. “We should be nice to each other. That is, _I_ should be nice to _you_. I should… no wait I shouldn’t be endearing, that was the abomination in Kirkwall…”

“Inquisitor, are you… ok?”

“Oh fuck,” Asha grumbled. Trust Cullen Rutherford to jump on the first title he could reasonably address her as rather than fumble endlessly with her gods-damned name. She took a sip from the drink she was still holding, which she had seemingly spilt mostly on the floor. She swallowed, closed her eyes, tried to collect herself, and attempted eloquence. “Would you like to have a... conversation? As colleagues?”

“...Right now?”

“Right now,” she confirmed. She gave a quick glance back at Varric, “I… err… won’t stare daggers at you. Apparently that’s a thing I do?”

Cullen glanced over his shoulder, noticing that she seemed to be directing most of this conversation somewhere that wasn’t, well, at him. He saw Varric, who became very engrossed in his empty mug, and when he turned back to Asha, his face was softened by understanding. “Inquisitor,” he said gently, and damn him Asha drank, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, or you’re uncomfortable with. I am perfectly capable of working with you even if you do choose to ‘stare daggers’ at me. Please ignore Varric’s meddling.”

With that, he turned to go. “No!” she blurted, tightening her grip on his arm. She looked down, a little unsure herself why she’d done it, especially as all he’d done was repeat all her own arguments. 

But then, she was going to have to talk to him at some point - it wasn’t like she could double-back on her last minute forgiveness, without looking like an insincere dick. Might as well break the seal on all of _that_ awkwardness when she was liquored up and drunk out of her mind. She sighed, “look, I chatted some really profound shit about focusing on the actual renegade demon templars and not hating you for the sake of it, back in Haven. I should make good on that. I mean, I like Cassandra, and she’s a templar! It must be hard for you too, having to face down people you…” _were too blind to see were totally fucking evil_ , “...believed were good.”

“I - you -” Cullen blinked, his brow furrowing, “you do realise you said both versions of that sentence _aloud_ , right?”

“Fuck!” Asha clapped her hand over her traitorous mouth. “Sorry! Ok, so I’m a terrible person. Would you like a drink?”

And for reasons that were entirely unfathomable to her personally, the Commander stared at her for a second, and then said, “...sure?”

She grinned at him, then directed that same triumphant smile at Varric even though he was the one getting what he wanted, before tugging Cullen over in the bar-ward direction, hand still on his arm. She made him sit down on one of the stools, possibly with a little too much force, and then got him an ale - “because you are a soldier,” she informed him very seriously, and she knew that soldiers liked ale from working with the Chargers so closely. And then got herself one too, because he was probably going to say ‘Inquisitor’ a lot, and she didn’t trust how long she would last with something hard liquor-y involved.

Once they were settled, Asha turned to him, now fully invested in the plan to not being an utter bitch. “Ok, so… um, what should we talk about?”

Cullen gave her a pained look, as if he’d been really hoping she would answer that question. “I suppose… congratulations are in order, regarding your appointment.”

“Why would you congratulate me? The ‘appointment’ was partly your idea. You literally picked me for it,” she pointed out, then paused, considering. “At least, I hope you did.”

“Of course I did,” he said, with extreme exasperation.

“Oh good,” she grinned, “I was worried you were about to shatter my dreams of a unanimous vote. Imagine the dents to my ego.”

“It _was_ unanimous.”

“Awwww.”

“We all believe you to be most suited to the role of Inquisitor.”

 _Damn._ Asha drank at the word, and they fell silent for a few breaths. Before it got awkward, she moved to speak. “So, um, what do you do?” she asked, then winced, cursing her stupid mouth, “I mean, you obviously _do_ a lot. I have seen you do a lot of things. I mean… all I know about you is that you are a templar-”

“- _Former_ templar.”

“- Former templar, and that you do army stuff for the Inquisition. What do you do _other_ than army stuff? And other than being a former templar,” Cullen looked at her, a long-suffering look in his eyes, and she sighed, “sorry! Alcohol is making this,” she gestured between them, at the act of conversation, “difficult. I promise I will stop saying the word ‘templar’. Do you have any… hobbies? Family? Do you like cats?”

“ _Do I like cats?_ ”

“Yes! Do you like cats?”

“ _This_ is the conversation you wanted to have with me?”

“Hey! I have been _reliably informed_ ,” she told him, hand to her chest, adjusting herself in her seat with lofty importance, “that I am ‘very, very good’ at getting people to like me. So, Cullen Rutherford, tell me: do you like cats?”

She saw his mouth twitch a little, which she frankly took as a victory. He considered for a second, before replying, “I do like cats, although I actually prefer dogs.”

“Of course you do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re,” she gestured again, at the whole ‘look at me I’m a well-built farmboy who worked his way up the ranks through honest hard work’ aesthetic, “you. Of course you’re a dog person!”

Cullen frowned again, “How did you know I was born on a farm?”

“Fuck!” Asha took a drink, this time to stop her apparently broken filter spilling everywhere. She really thought she’d kept thoughts on his aesthetic internal. “Well, _I_ prefer cats.”

“Aren’t you Dalish?” Cullen blushed a little, when Asha, with her vallaslin face, gave him a pointed look, hopefully signalling to him that his conversational prowess was just about equal to her own. “I just meant, surely cats are a far less practical pet for a nomadic people than a dog is.”

“That’s why!” she said, emphatically, “I never really saw cats unless I went into towns. I didn’t own a dog because I wasn’t a full-time hunter, and then whenever I went into villages I’d always get surrounded by alley cats who were desperate for food. I used to save them my scraps in my pockets so I could feed them and pretend they were my pets. There was one in a town near us who always followed me whenever I passed through, it was all black and then it had a tiny spot of white juuuuuust here.” She planted a fingertip in the centre of her forehead to demonstrate, canting slightly as she turned cross-eyed, “Fifteen-year-old me always imagined keeping it with me as my familiar, like I was the Witch of the Wilds.”

She glanced over at Cullen, who was trying his very valiant best to keep up with her speech, and realised she’d just monologued about cats. “So,” she said, awkwardly. “Hobbies?”

“Oh,” Cullen blinked, “well - um - fencing. Horseriding.”

Asha groaned, “ _other_ than army stuff, remember?”

“Well, I play chess.”

“Isn’t that just gamified military strategy?”

Cullen was looking a little flustered now. “I... read.”

“What do you read?”

Cullen blushed. It was rather fascinating to watch.

Asha reviewed the scant amount of knowledge she had in all her time knowing Cullen Rutherford, and then gasped. “Motherfucker, it’s military strategy, isn’t it?”

He nodded, then gave her a slightly guilty sideways glance. “Sometimes... military history.”

Asha couldn’t help it. She laughed, and it wasn’t entirely at his expense, because she could tell his guilt was partly for show. When she saw Cullen fighting a smile, she nudged him, “hey, that must get _dry_. You should like, try a romance or a mystery sometime. Have you read anything that Varric’s written? Is it any good?”

“Everything that Varric writes is set in _Kirkwall_ ,” he replied, as if that was an obstacle that should have been obvious to her.

“Well then, diversify in some other way!” she grinned, “have you considered taking up baking? Or um… embroidery? I’m genuinely worried that the next leisure activity out of your mouth is going to be ‘praying to Andraste’ or ‘chantry choir’ or something.”

There was a small pause.

“...You were in a chantry choir, weren’t you?”

“Not by choice!” he said, somewhat helplessly, “It was when I was younger, when I was, well -”

“Don’t worry,” she grinned reassuringly as he skirted around the concept of ‘templar school’ with all the agility of an ogre. “I won’t hold it against you. You sang _very prettily_ back at Haven. Any choir would be lucky to have you.”

He squirmed in his seat, and she relented, realising that this probably wasn’t the best way to get someone to like her. _I’ll stop teasing about your ridiculous workaholic, chantry boy tendencies._

That time, she did realise that her thought had been spoken aloud, because Cullen gave her such a look of wounded suffering that she began giggling and couldn’t seem to stop. He gave her a severe look - not quite a glare, but certainly a little annoyed. “What about you, then?” he retorted, “what are your hobbies, Inquisitor? All I’ve seen you do in the last three months here are practice magic, train with Cassandra, and then… get drunk!”

“Well, none of those things are my hobbies, that was my attempt to be good at my job!” she took a drink, then positioned herself again, hand on her chest, “I… like hiking.”

“How very _Dalish_ of you.”

“Nuh-uh, friend,” she waved her finger at him, “that approach doesn’t work with me, because I _also hate gardening_.”

Cullen nodded, as if this reasoning made perfect sense. She saw his mouth twitch a little again.

“I can paint,” she informed him, ticking things off on her fingers, “I can sew - I love making dresses - and I can knit - I once made a very fine set of scarves for my family. And I know every myth of Arlathan, which I suppose is _very Dalish_ , but that’s storytelling, and it’s a little more exciting than reading military strategy in my ‘spare time’...”

“Oh?” Cullen smiled at her, “what’s your favourite story, then?”

Asha gave him a sharp look, expecting his expression to signal that he was joking, or at least display the kind of indifference that told her he was only asking out of politeness. But he seemed sincere, and so Asha launched into an account of how Mythal fought Andruil in a serpent form to claim knowledge of the Void. She was halfway through when it occurred to her that he’d probably just wanted a synopsis rather than a recounting, but then she was halfway through a story. 

And Deshanna would never have chosen her as a successor if she was the kind of person who gave up on a tale _halfway through_.

She didn’t know how long it took her to wrap it up, but it was probably about ten minutes, which was pretty good considering that she was slurring every sixth word. “The great hunter could never make her way back to the abyss, and so her madness was vanquished, and peace returned,” she finished, with a final theatrical gesture, and then rested her head against the countertop of the bar, though she wasn’t quite sure why. She looked up at the Commander, “So - what did you think?”

“I think that it was a beautiful story,” Cullen started carefully. 

Asha narrowed her eyes at him, “it’s like, half blood and guts! And snakes!”

He looked a little shamefaced, as if he knew the speech had been inadequate, “I… also think that you might be very, very drunk.”

“Ha! Deshanna once said that she taught me the tales so that when I was sloshed and running my mouth I was at least saying something useful,” Asha grinned. Then she tapped her nose, which took two attempts because the angle of being horizontal was confusing, “joke’s on her! Ellana used to get me drunk just so we could test whether I could recite them flawlessly from memory!”

“Ellana - your sister?”

Asha suddenly sat up ramrod straight, like someone had dumped cold water over her head. She glared at him like she didn’t trust why he was asking. “...Yes?"

“You’ve mentioned her to me before.”

“...I did?”

“You,” was it her imagination, or was he blushing again? “Said that she liked stories.”

“Oh? I did? I mean, she did! All the ones that had lovers pining after each other and then dying in the cold to preserve their honour, rather than just admitting they wanted to fuck.”

Cullen’s sputtered a little into his cup, coughing and clearing his throat before asking, “Are there lots of those... in Dalish mythology?” 

“Not many - we tend to go down the sex or death route a little differently, with lots more stabby-revenge women-scorned stuff. But you _shemlen_ more than make up for it. Orlais _fucking loves_ a bit of courtly romance with nothing more racy than a forehead kiss, which strikes me as fucking absurd now that I’ve actually been to Orlais. I met a bard in Starkhaven, she told me more than enough stories to keep Ellana happy.”

“You’ve been to Starkhaven?”

“Yes, it was _cold_.” she muttered muzzily.

“I have sisters,” Cullen said, somewhat out of the blue. Asha gave him a look, “you asked me about family. Before. I have sisters. Two of them, and a brother. Mia was older than me, and Rosalie several years younger.”

“Oh. What are they like?”

“I… don’t actually know, really. It’s been a long time since I saw them.”

“Ellana was so pretty,” Asha murmured, shunting her glass around on the sticky bar top. “She had all this… hair,” she gestured to indicate a surplus of curls, that she’d always had to wrangle into something respectable when El had been too small to do it herself. 

She sighed, “I always knew I was going to lose her. It was just a matter of learning to make peace with that, trying not to love her so much so that it wouldn’t hurt when she left. She’d had twelve proposals the day by the time she turned nineteen. _Twelve_! Do you know how hard it was to be her sister? She refused them all, but I always knew she’d find someone gorgeous to say yes to eventually. She was _very_ shallow. And then she’d go, and I’d stay behind.”

She felt a hand on her arm, startling out of her drunken ramble. The Commander made the comforting gesture almost gingerly, like he feared she might burn him where he stood for attempting it. “I… I’m not sure I’m the person you want to be telling this to, Inquisitor. 

Asha was a little offended that he’d halted her monologue on Ellana’s perfections, though some part of her knew he was right, that she’d be mortified by morning. She drained her ale and Cullen made a noise, like he thought that was potentially a bad idea. Afterwards she placed her forehead down on the bartop again, wanting the extra support.

"Inquisitor, you really are quite drunk."

“Excuse you! You would be drunk too, if you had just been made Inquisitor, and then had to drink every time someone said the word ‘Inquisitor’,” she mumbled into the wood.

His face lit up with understanding, looking down at where she clung to the bar for dear life. She could see in his face that he was tallying up all the times he’d referred to her as Inquisitor himself.

“Well...” the Commander said, eloquently, “shit.”

For some reason, hearing Cullen Rutherford cuss for the first time seemed to be one of the funniest things Asha had ever heard. Whereas moments ago, she’d been about to cry thinking about Ellana, now Asha couldn’t stop laughing.

Cullen wasn’t trying to help the very drunk Asha Lavellan back to her room.

No - drunk Asha Lavellan wanted to go see _Solas_.

“He didn’t come to my party,” she grumbled, as she wove through the courtyard like the flat surface was the deck of a ship at sea. “ _You_ came to my party, and you clearly don’t like parties! Why didn’t he come?”

Cullen personally thought it was a terrible idea for the Inquisitor to be going anywhere but her bed, but was aware that they weren’t exactly on a footing where he could give such counsel on her behaviour. He didn’t want to push his luck. Had he been asked an hour ago if he and the Inquisitor had the kind of relationship where she would actively seek him out in a crowd and then act out a Dalish legend for him, complete with character voices, before waxing lyrical about her beautiful, shallow sister, he would’ve said no, but clearly things had shifted without his knowledge. He was honestly just trying to keep up.

He’d also been trying to keep up, gingerly steering the conversation towards the suggestion that she call it a night, when Asha had suddenly stood with a sense of conviction that only the drunk could aspire to, and walked out of the tavern without another word, cutting their talk short. Cullen had been ready to take that as a dismissal, almost glad for the space to gather his rather scattered thoughts, but then she’d nearly barrelled into the door frame and he’d only made it just in time to catch her before she gave herself a grievous injury. Before he knew what was happening, he’d become her escort. When he’d shut the tavern door behind them, he’d seen Varric grinning at him from the bar, and wanted to hit him for whatever plan he thought he’d executed.

“I don’t _hate_ parties,” he muttered.

“Shush you, why don’t you have a really wild night and go read some ‘military history’! I don’t need an escort!”

Cullen’s eyes flickered to the night sky, and he quickly sent up a prayer to Andraste for some patience. There were only so many backhanded compliments or outright insults a man could take in one night. This would all be over soon. His new office was close to the library, which meant that he could get her safely deposited with Solas with little inconvenience to himself. 

It was a purely practical concern - he was having nightmare visions of her choosing to drunkenly fadestep again, and the walls of Skyhold were _much_ higher than any of the buildings in Haven.

He was glad that the Inquisitor was, at least, in high spirits. All four of them, Cassandra especially, had been terrified that their request for her to become leader of the Inquisition would result in her breaking down into tears in front of them. They’d all felt guilty at the idea of asking her, knowing they were requesting too much. But the reckless, smiling woman in front of him was miles away from the exhausted shell they’d rescued from the snow in Haven, and was simultaneously much closer to the same woman who’d whacked a shade over the head and been seemingly unable to filter her thoughts the day they sealed the Breach. The rapid turnaround was pretty terrifying, if he was honest.

“This way, Inquisitor,” he said gently, steering her towards the stairs.

“Well, if you don’t hate parties, you definitely hate me,” she continued, picking up the lost thread of conversation as she followed his command. “Solas likes me way more than you. Therefore, he should be at my party.”

“I do not hate you either, Inquisitor,” Cullen replied tersely.

“Yes you do! You never use my name!”

 _I didn’t think I was allowed to_ , he wanted to say. And it had quickly become far too awkward to ask permission. “I do not hate you, Asha.” was what he said instead, his voice quiet in the night air.

“Are you sure? Then why did you want me to work with templars?”

 _Ah._ It seemed their moratorium on the word ‘templar’ had been lifted. Cullen wondered if he should move away from her to make her more comfortable in their discussion, but then she canted to the right and nearly toppled over the side of the very high stairway, so he kept close enough to check her. “As I’ve said before, it wasn’t so much an issue of wanting you to work with templars, as of not wanting mages to be working with the Breach.”

“But _I’m_ a mage.”

“Indeed. It was a needless concern, as you’ve now proven.” He hoped that was an end to the conversation, at least for now. He really didn’t want to have to give the explanation and apology he’d carefully rehearsed at a point when there was no way she’d remember it by morning.

“Do you think it’s my fault?”

Her voice was so small, that he wasn’t sure he’d even heard her speak. But she glanced back at him, waiting for a response, and so he asked, “What’s your fault, In- Asha?”

“The red templars. Do you blame me? If we hadn’t been checking out Redcliffe, we’d have known what they were doing. And Cass told me, in the future - she told me that templars and red lyrium don’t mix.”

Cullen struggled for a way to reply, so he chose the simplest part of the statement to respond to. “Yes, you said.”

“I did?”

 _When you were a confused, shocked mess, and I asked you why I hadn’t featured in this horrific future._ “I don’t blame you, Asha,” he said tiredly, “It wasn’t as if you locked all the Order away and transformed them yourself. I only blame Samson.”

“But I was _happy_ ,” she whispered as she turned to face away from him, and her voice broke on the word. Cullen winced, and remained silent, because he knew there was absolutely no way she’d say such a thing to him if she was sober, and he didn’t have the right to know it. 

There were so many things he _wanted_ to say though. He’d known that kind of rage, once, the delight in pain inflicted just close enough to the heart of the issue for it to feel like revenge. He remembered the way he’d begged Rose Amell to _hurt_ Uldred. The way he’d sought out blood mages in Kirkwall to try and fit a story his younger self had desperately willed to be true, rather than accept that sometimes justice was not a perfect sum. 

“I saw him there,” she told him, as they finally reached the parapets. “He tried to hurt me, and he couldn’t, because of the lyrium. I was glad it happened.”

“Who, Samson?” he asked, gently. They’d all seen him there, waiting at the outskirts of the destroyed village. But she shook her head, lips pursed to stop them from trembling. 

She fell silent then, and he thought that this torturous, painful conversation was finally over. It was like peeking at someone’s diary, hearing her talk like this, and he really, really wished they’d stayed on the topic of cats. He led her through his shadowed office, in its half-finished state - he had a desk, and was waiting on a set of bookshelves he had commissioned with Blackwall - and through onto the walkway that led to the tower where Solas had set up his quarters.

She stopped on the path, looking at the shadows of mountains in the dark before craning her neck up to look at the constellations of stars above. Skyhold had some very impressive views, so he didn’t prompt her to move.

“When I first met you, I thought you wanted to kill me,” she said, suddenly, her voice still holding that quiet, thoughtful quality.

“I - what?” Cullen was too horrified to form a coherent thought. That was just beyond unfair - what had he ever done to warrant such a snap judgement? He’d tried to save her from demons she’d all but thrown herself at! She hadn’t even known he was a templar then!

“Oh!” she glanced back at him and his horrified expression, and then, impossibly, laughed. “No! No! Sorry! Not because you’re a templar! I thought you wanted to kill me because of what I did with that terror demon. Hitting it over the head, yelling at you to stab it. I was worried you’d stab _me_ , I thought you found me so annoying!”

“...Oh.”

“Am I annoying?” She cocked her head, watching him and waiting for his answer. Which was stupid, because she had started walking forward at the same time, and so he had to lunge towards her when she almost tripped blindly over a mismatched pave stone.

Hands on her arms, trying to keep an arm's-length distance between them, he looked at her with exasperation. She seemed genuinely interested in the answer he would give. _I thought you were foolish and reckless and very pretty_ , he thought. But he wasn’t the one that was drunk. So he said, simply, “no, Asha, I don’t find you annoying, though you seem to be trying your level best to change that.”

She blinked, and then snorted a laugh. “So _sassy_ ,” she said, with an innocently appreciative grin, like she was proud to have broken his polite exterior. Then she broke his grip and started weaving back to his office. He watched for a second, confused, before realising that she hadn’t remembered that she’d turned around to talk to him. With a sigh, he realigned her so they were walking in the direction of Solas again.

She walked up to the door, and knocked on it, like it was someone’s home, and not a part of the massive fortress she now technically owned. Then, when three seconds passed and no one magically materialised, she hammered on the door again, louder. Cullen, with mounting dread, was just about to intervene, when it swung open, to reveal a rumpled Solas with a very confused expression. It didn’t seem like he’d been asleep, Cullen noted with relief, just very much not expecting company.

“ _Lethallan_ ,” he said, carefully, taking in Asha and then her escort with a furrow in his brow.

“Solas!” she sang, before diving towards him and hugging him tightly round his waist, burying her face in his shoulder. Solas gave Cullen a slightly horrified look over the top of her head - Cullen returned it, given that he didn’t really want to be a witness to this either - as she pulled back, dropping her arms. “You didn’t come to my party,” she said, almost petulantly, like she was a child denied cake on her birthday.

“I... didn’t realise I was welcome.”

“It was the opening of a tavern in the castle you gave me, asshole, of course you were welcome,” she said, and then pushed past him into the room. Solas closed his eyes as she brushed past, no doubt fortifying himself against the stench of alcohol that currently accompanied the new Inquisitor in a wave. He and Cullen were left standing there, looking at each other nonplussed.

“She’s - uh - your problem now,” Cullen said, inadequately. He relinquished the Herald with only a little sinking feeling in his chest - to be honest, he wasn’t entirely sure he envied the other man having to field another set of hideously pointed questions. “I just wanted to make sure she got here safely.”

Solas watched him, and Cullen fought the urge to explain further. Doing so would only make him sound guilty, and he’d done nothing wrong, or even particularly noteworthy. 

“She’s very, very drunk,” he admitted finally, when the silence drew out too long.

“ _Ma serannas_ ,” Solas sighed, and then shut the door.

Cullen, left on the walkway, found himself thoroughly at a loss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which the author teases Bioware for how they write every 'awkward military guy' love interest, lovingly.
> 
> For a while when drafting this chapter I was terrified I was turning Asha into a manic pixie dream girl, but honestly drunk girls are just Like That™


	35. Chapter Thirty-Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inquisitor Lavellan's first day of work doesn't go entirely as planned...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: vomiting
> 
> Also TW for Dubious Mental Health advice (aka don't get therapy from assassins)

Asha Lavellan’s first full day as Inquisitor began with her being sick, four times, into one of Skyhold’s many old, and hopefully _not_ priceless, vases.

“Do you think I can take it with me to the war room?” she muttered when she’d finished retching, looking over to where Solas watched her from the opposite side of the alcove she was ensconced in. 

She’d woken up on one of the mouldering chaise lounges that currently sat dusty in the library, swaddled in a blanket with absolutely no memory of how she'd ended up there. Judging by her headache, she probably didn’t want to know the answer - she was merely thankful she hadn’t woken up naked in bed next to someone. Gods, maybe that had been her original goal, and they’d rejected her, because she had clearly been shitfaced! With that thought, she’d tried to stand up, hoping that she’d be able to slink away silently without having to face the consequences of her actions 

But, well. Moving was an _extremely bad_ idea. 

Now she had a vase.

“It is probably not wise,” Solas said gently, “do you think you can mindblast now?”

Solas had found her, sitting at her side while her body seemingly rejected every substance she’d ever ingested in her life, ever. She wanted him to go away - this was all so mortifying, like she was a teenager who couldn’t hold her liquor. And she was sure she looked _hideous_ , clammy and stinking of alcohol. But he’d stayed, damn him, even holding back her hair until she shrugged him off.

“I’m so so sorry,” she said forlornly, not for the first time. “I’m so sorry, Solas.”

“Do not worry, _lethallan_ \- it happens to the best of us,” he gave her a small smile.

“...I had to drink every time someone called me ‘Inquisitor’.”

“Yes, you told me that fact. It was Master Tethras’ devising.”

She sighed, putting the vase gingerly down next to her. “Ok, let’s try a…” she grimaced, wondering if she was going to be sick again at the thought of the dizzying effect of the spell.

She stood up and moved away from the alcove, and the vase - gods knew she didn’t want to mindblast that, or its contents. Once she’d positioned herself a suitable distance away, she turned her awareness inwards, building up the spell. “I really, really hope I didn’t bother you last night,” she said, as a distraction, knowing that of course she had. What this question really was, was a test - _please please tell me I didn’t do something extremely stupid_.

Solas raised a single eyebrow at her, as if he could hear her thoughts. “I’ve seen you drunk before, Asha. The pleasure of your company, though unexpected, was not an unwelcome one,” he replied, diplomatically.

If Asha hadn’t been concentrating, she would’ve told him exactly where he could shove his diplomatic answer, the _bastard_. 

“You should’ve…come to the party!” her brow furrowed, and she closed her eyes, as the spell snagged, and her world threatened to tip.

She released the mindblast, the dizzying energy exploding through the empty blast radius. Almost immediately, she felt better, but still lunged for the vase, her body protesting her attempt at bending both gravity and biology. Magical hangover cures did not come without costs. 

When she’d finished retching, Solas handed her a health potion to finish off her fast-tracked recovery. “Yes, consider me thoroughly lectured on that front, as well, _lethallan_ ,” his voice was dry, and thoroughly amused, entirely at her expense. “I swear I will not make such a grave error in judgement again.”

“...I’m sorry I annoyed you. I’m sorry I didn’t go home.”

“‘Home’, in this case, is three flights of stairs away,” Solas reminded her, “technically, the definition can be expanded very easily to encompass this library.” When Asha glared at him over the rim of the vase, his expression softened, “we talked, and then you fell asleep at my desk, _lethallan_. It seemed... prudent to let you rest, and I could not carry you back to your room without disturbing you.”

“Are you saying I’m heavy?”

“I-”

“Because thank the Gods! I was getting sick of everyone being able to toss me about like a bag of flour. I’m trying to gain muscle _for a reason_.” She finished drinking the health potion, feeling more alive with every mouthful, before she realised fully what he’d said, and then froze. She looked at him warily, “...what _exactly_ did we talk about?”

Solas smiled, “many things. The Commander’s love of military history, which you apparently find extremely one-note, being one of them. The paints I’ve asked Josephine to purchase, being another.”

“Oh,” Asha wrinkled her brow, as a wave of memories of being friendly with Cullen Rutherford, of all people, rushed back. Oh Creators, she’d been so very, very drunk. No doubt she’d scandalised the man in some way. Her time with Solas, however, remained an increasingly worrying blank, that made her ask, tentatively, “So we just… talked?”

Something about the silence shifted, with that question. Solas’ grin widened knowingly, and became slightly wolfish. “What else might’ve we been doing, _lethallan_?” he asked, with practised, measured innocence, like he was daring her to answer.

“I just - I mean, I hope I didn’t -”

“Didn’t... what?”

“Don’t be an ass!”

“I’m very interested to hear what activities you think we might have partaken in, _lethallan_.”

Asha’s stomach swooped a little in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with feeling queasy, and she knew she was blushing. Hopefully, her face was already feverish from all the vomiting she’d been doing. “I need to go bathe,” she blurted, looking down at herself, and suddenly very very conscious of how _unattractive_ she was, hungover and sweaty. “I’ll - I’ll take the vase.”

Solas was still smiling at her, eyes tracking her fidgeting movements, like he enjoyed making her a little nervous. She tucked her sweat damp hair behind her ears, stood up, and made to flee as quickly as she could, stammering her goodbyes. 

She paused for a second at the threshold, heart hammering, and said, “I - we - I’ve forgiven you. For what happened at Redcliffe. So… you should come to my parties. You’re more than welcome.” And then she... well, _ran_ out of the alcove.

“Keeping it classy now that you’re titled, I see,” remarked Dorian, as she scurried past, clutching the vase to her chest.

“I - we didn’t - not while I - I was just sick!” she hissed.

Her fellow mage’s bright eyes glittered as he grinned at her, “I know - believe me, I heard. What did _you_ think I was talking about?”

Wishing the ground would swallow her whole, Asha hastily emptied the vase into the nearest privy before washing it out with water and then placing it in a hopefully innocuous corner. With a spare change of clothes, she ran to the baths, knowing that she’d soon be verging on late to her first war room meeting. 

Halfway there, with her fear of monumentally fucking up her new position in the Inquisition on the very first day, her anxious thoughts triggered a half-formed memory from the night before -

_“Did you mean for this to happen?” she asked Solas muzzily, as she rifled through the charcoal sketches on his desk, of the Elder One, and a woman with a long mane of hair and a mythal vallaslin that she assumed must be her._

_“For what to happen?”_

_“For this,” she’d gestured at herself, “for me being made Inquisitor. You_ said _it: ‘be their guide’, ‘you will need every advantage’, blah blah. You could’ve shown them Skyhold - you could’ve led them there. But you made me do it. Did you plan for all of this? Did you want me to lead the Inquisition?”_

_“Lethallan...”_

_“Why did you do it? To protect the elven artefact?”_

Asha swallowed against a dry mouth. The patches of memory also gave her vivid recollection of _being_ drunk, and her stomach wasn’t quite ready to handle that yet. Searching her memory, she couldn’t remember Solas’ answer to her question - which hadn’t been an angry one, merely curious. She felt like she’d wanted to know if Solas considered her good leadership material. She’d taken some comfort in the idea that someone else other than her had control over this situation, or at least the trust in her to see it through.

She wondered why he hadn’t mentioned that that was what they’d talked about. Maybe she hadn’t liked the answer he gave.

“I’m so, so sorry I’m late!” she gasped, finishing her sprint into the war room.

“Believe me, some of us are merely surprised you can stand,” replied Leliana, with a wicked glint in her eye as she took in Asha’s very recently washed and still very damp appearance.

“There’s no need to panic! Cassandra is not here yet,” Josephine said, offering Asha a much kinder smile.

“Are you… well?” Cullen said, looking up from his documents. He kept his face carefully neutral - she guessed he was worried that when she wasn’t stupid drunk, they would be back to their routine of frigid, cordial politeness.

But Varric, damn him, was right. Now that she’d broken the seal on speaking to him like he wasn’t about to Silence her any minute, she couldn’t find it in her heart to retreat into prickly distrust just for the sake of it. That felt… petty. And she could only imagine how much she’d embarrassed herself in front of him - the fact he was talking to her proved a level of patience that she felt should be acknowledged. “Biggest perk of being a mage: the joys of mindblast after a night out!” she said, with a weak smile, “no matter how obnoxiously shitfaced I get, I should be able to recover. Whether you think that’s a good thing or not - some people might argue that it would be _better_ if there were consequences to my actions -”

“I like drunk-Asha,” Josie said, dimpling, “she is… endearing.”

“You know, it’s that kind of thinking that might lead to me being put in an undeserving position of power-”

“ _Not_ undeserving,” Cullen interrupted, firmly.

“Your inauguration speech was very well-received,” Leliana added. “...not _quite_ as well-received as your rendition of Dalish myth…”

Asha pinked slightly as the memory washed over - gods, what had she been thinking?! A quick glance at Cullen told her that he was similarly uncomfortable, the tips of his ears burning. He’d probably found the whole thing too awkward and struggled to get her to stop. Maybe he’d been _unable_ to get her to stop. The poor man.

Thankfully, they were saved by the entrance of a stormy-looking Cassandra, who strode into the room, grumpily announcing, “I am going to _kill_ Varric.”

Leliana raised a single, unimpressed eyebrow, “for any reason in particular, or is it just a day in the week?”

“He knows where Sidonie is,” Cass snarled. Everyone in the war room froze, heads snapping up to look at her, and the Seeker herself was simmering with barely contained rage, like she wanted to flip the new war table. “He’s known where Sidonie was _this whole time_.”

Asha glanced hastily around the assembled group as both Cullen and Leliana let out furious oaths. When their anger subsided, she cast a confused glance around the room. “Um… who’s Sidonie?” she asked, tentatively. 

“That would be Sidonie Hawke,” Cullen informed her, rubbing his temples, “Champion of Kirkwall - well, somewhat former Champion. Though the title is technically hers, she does not spend much time in the city.” He looked to his friend, “and where exactly is she, Cassandra?”

“Varric claims she is on a ship with Isabela,” the Seeker ground out.

“Oh! Well, I mean, that’s kind of what we assumed-”

“On a ship with Isabela, _anchored on the Storm Coast_.”

“...Ah.” 

“She’s been chasing red lyrium smugglers in Ferelden for _months_ ,” Cass muttered, “she was in Amaranthine when the Breach opened.”

“Maker preserve us,” Cullen replied, shaking his head. Leliana was visibly seething.

“Well, that’s a good thing, right?” Asha said, not really understanding Cassandra’s anger. “I thought he was worried about her? He seems to miss her a lot...”

She trailed off mid-sentence. Cassandra really did look like she was about to hit something, hard.

Leliana cleared her throat. “It is certainly to our advantage to have Hawke’s… expertise on our side. Why she couldn’t have provided it to us months ago, is perhaps why Cassandra is angry. We approached Varric with the aims of recruiting Sid for the Inquisition. To be its leader. He was not forthcoming on any means of contacting her - even less so than we previously realised, it seems.”

“He says,” Cass said through gritted teeth, “that he and Sidonie fought Corypheus, before. That Sidonie has _information_ on Corypheus, that she will be able to share with us, once she gets here. To Skyhold.”

Asha tried to hold in an excited squeal, and mostly succeeded, simply dancing on the spot instead. She couldn't lie, she was filled with not a small amount of hero worship - it was hard not to be, with Varric being the storyteller he was, and Hawke’s exploits always the thing he most seemed to enjoy telling. “Ok, but that’s kind of amazing!” she blurted, finally, unable to hold it in. Both Josie and Leliana shared a smile at her expense.

Cassandra’s body began to lose its tension, and her lips seemed to twitch unwillingly, though she fought to keep a stoic expression. They moved over to the war table, and it was Asha’s turn to become nervous, looking down at the map of Thedas. She really had only attended these meetings in a cursory capacity before, or to talk through the plans in which she was a main player, when she had actual questions to ask. “So, um,” she said, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, “what do we… do?”

Leliana gave her a slightly indulgent smile, and said, “I suppose we plan our next move against the Elder One.”

“Fuck. No pressure, then.”

“We have the advantage of knowing what he wants to do next,” Cullen pointed out, “in that strange future you encountered, the Orlesian Empire had crumpled after Corypheus had Empress Celene assassinated. And we know of his plans for a demon army...”

And so the meeting began, picking apart the leads they already had to work with: Empress Celene, the demon army, Hawke, and then Raleigh Samson, whom Cullen seemed to know from his time in Kirkwall. Asha felt a little sick, hearing the Commander talk of his former colleague: he’d tried to oust Commander Meredith - who she knew from Varric was a total homicidal bitch - along with some other mage sympathists. He didn’t sound like a terrible man, from what Cullen had to say about him, and she had to admit that even his own tone held a good deal of confusion, as if he couldn’t exactly understand why Samson was now their primary enemy. His gaze kept shifting to look at her while he spoke, like he expected to snap at him on the subject of templars any minute. There were certainly times she had to bite her tongue, but really, she wasn’t sure what purpose being snide would actually serve.

The only time she really fought to keep her face impassive was when he discussed Samson’s lyrium addiction. She had had no idea that templars could get ‘addicted’ to lyrium. She’d never really used it, personally, until she came here where there was a ready supply. _Creators,_ she thought, _I hope it’s not too widespread_. But there was no way that could happen, right? The Chantry wouldn’t harm it’s _own_ people that way.

But there was one continually uncomfortable element to this particular conversation: the more they circled the topic of the Red Templar army, the more it became inexcusable to keep lying by omission. Once Cullen had stopped speaking, she took a deep breath.

“Um-” she started to speak, and every eye at the table pinned directly to her, making the room feel a little claustrophobic. Again, she could see Cullen bracing himself for whatever onslaught he anticipated from her. “So…” she cleared her throat again, placing a hand on her chest, against her pounding heart, “so, um… I just thought I should tell you all - back at Haven, when we were fighting Corypheus’ army. I - well, I saw somebody. A templar.”

Leliana raised a single eyebrow. Everyone else was silent.

“I mean, we all saw a lot of templars, that day.” Asha closed her eyes briefly, let out a shuddering breath, “What I’m trying to say, is that I saw… one of _my_ templars. From - from the attack on my clan.”

Josie - being the kind, empathetic person she was - gasped, a hand coming to cover her mouth in a picture of sympathy. “Oh, Asha,” she said quietly. Everyone at the table looked vaguely horrified.

“He was… um…” Asha wiped her palms on her trousers, they were suddenly clammy. “Young - probably my age, mid-to-late twenties? Maybe a year younger? Dark hair, to his jawline? Pockmark scars, on his cheeks? I recognised him. From the massacre. He was in the clearing, when Cassandra and I were first moving the trebuchets. He turned into one of the - the chunky red lyrium monsters - the -”

“Behemoths,” Cullen supplied, his voice flat.

“Denam.” Cassandra said, at the same time, causing everyone to pause.

Asha blinked, “Excuse me?”

“His name was Denam,” Cass said carefully, glancing over at her. “I was in that clearing with you - I recognised him too. I was there, visiting with Seeker Lucius, when he was made Knight Captain a year and a half ago, at Therinfall Redoubt.”

“Denam…” Cullen frowned, “I remember that name. He was in the Kirkwall Order on secondment - part of the reserves that Meredith called in to deal with the unrest in the city. He… he was there when the Circle fell. And he knew Samson.”

Asha swallowed against a dry mouth, glad she had nothing left in her stomach to throw up. “Yes, well,” she said, inadequately, “that makes sense. I guess.”

"This man Denam is the reason for the way you acted in Haven,” Leliana said suddenly, narrowing her eyes.

“I... beg your pardon? What was wrong with the way I acted in Haven?”

“Your actions, though successful, were needlessly reckless - presumably because you’d seen someone from your past.”

Asha couldn’t fight the small amount of hurt in her chest, which reduced her actions to something that sounded almost petty. “Hey! -”

“-You weren’t there, Leliana,” Cullen interrupted, and then pinked, casting an apologetic glance at Asha. “The Inquisitor’s… Asha’s actions were not reckless: they were a dire set of choices she did not hesitate to make, in the moment, when it mattered. They were better than anything I bought to the table.”

“It does not change the Inquisitor’s motivations for making them,” Leliana observed, blandly.

“The way you helped those villagers…” Cassandra trailed off, coming to some kind of realisation.

“Asha, I -” Josie’s eyes were full of sympathy, to the point where on anyone else it looked like pity, ““I’m so sorry.”

“Stop that!” Asha said, a little angrily. She didn’t know what it was about the way that the advisors were looking at her that set her on edge, only that it did. “It worked, didn’t it! And… and you’re ignoring the actual important part of what I’m trying to say - the massacre of Clan Lavellan was perpetrated by Red Templars.”

“Well, unfortunately my reports tell me that nearly all templars are now Red Templars, bar a few unaffiliated groups and the ones in our own ranks,” Leliana said calmly, “I’d already made that leap of logic myself.”

“Well, _good for you_."

“Leliana,” Cassandra gave her friend a pointed look, signalling that she was overstepping her bounds. “Asha is right to point it out. If the Red Templars are led by Samson, and the slaughter of Clan Lavellan already has its ties to the Kirkwall Order, we should at least try to explore the connections between them, and certainly we should ascertain Denam’s level of involvement in both. We can still bring Asha’s attackers to justice - this, at least, proves they were not simply lost to the explosion at the Conclave. Our two goals align, even more so than before.”

And with that, the conversation moved swiftly on, though Asha felt like they were all surreptitiously watching her, even when they purposefully kept their eyes pinned to the map in front of them. She hadn’t liked hiding the existence of Denam from them, but now she wished she’d kept it to herself. They already knew she was happy to fight templars - maybe it hadn’t needed to get more personal than that. She didn’t need them all analysing her behaviour in a way that made her skin itch and her tranquil brand feel like it was practically burning through her clothes. She was relieved when the meeting drew to a close.

“Asha, a word,” said Leliana, in a dangerous sounding voice, as they began to disperse.

“Leliana,” Cass gave the Nightingale a warning look.

“I need to discuss the finer points of my spy network with her, now that she is more closely involved.”

“It’s fine, Cassandra,” Asha said, though it was clear no one believed the woman's excuse. “I’m free.”

Her friend looked unconvinced, but didn’t protest further when Asha followed Leliana out of the war room a few moments later, the spymaster striding towards her chambers in the library. The made their way through Skyhold in taut, tense silence, until they reached the rookery. It was ramshackle, half birdcages and half debris, though there were growing piles of notes on every surface.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” Asha asked, looking around the half-made office.

“Sit down,” the Nightingale ordered, in a tone that left Asha feeling affronted. She didn't like being commanded, but on the other hand Leliana was fucking terrifying, so she took her seat.

“We need to discuss the certain… volatility surrounding your emotions,” Leliana said brusquely, pulling another dusty chair over and sitting down on the opposite side of the table, “the others have danced around it for weeks, but it's pointless to ignore it if it continues to be a problem.”

“What are you talking about?”

Leliana gave her an unimpressed look, and Asha couldn’t blame her - she’d sounded defensive and insincere even as she asked the question. “Nearly a month ago, you attacked Redcliffe Castle alone in a fit of rage,” the Nightingale stated matter-of-factly, her tone decidedly clinical. She held out a hand to silence her as Asha opened her mouth to protest, “only a week later, you throw yourself at a darkspawn magister with no concern for your own life in what can only be described as a deliberate attempt at martyrdom, regardless as to whether you survived. Now, we discover that impulse that was also triggered by a single, chance incident.”

“Do you have any criticism for how my actions played out? Would you rather we had all died in Haven?” 

“I suppose you expect me to be the kind of person who feels like the ends always justify the means,” Leliana observed blandly, looking down at her nails. “If that was the case, I should be rejoicing. But the fact is that your actions could have had catastrophic consequences, and, as your colleague, adviser, and friend, I cannot pretend any longer.”

“I - excuse me?” 

“You are brilliant, Asha. We would not put you in this position otherwise, and I do trust you to one day do great things _with intention_ , and not just incidentally. But I will not coddle you just because you now plaster a smile on your face when three weeks ago you were walking around empty.”

“I’d - I’d just watched everyone in the Inquisition _die_ -”

“And witnessing such things undoubtedly takes its toll,” Leliana finished for her. “One that you never ask for help bearing. One which you refuse to acknowledge for any length of time, and deflect any discussion of. It is obvious to everyone who watches and interacts with you that you bear a pain that you have never been given the opportunity to acknowledge or process. I’m sorry, but I cannot give you the leave to deal with it on your own terms any longer, given your stubborn refusal to do so. Your moods are fluctuating in such a way that it clearly affects the decisions you make for yourself, and for us all.”

Asha’s chest was aching, and she didn’t know why. Her instinct was to try and numb it, to stop it from feeling so tender, like her heart was about to bleed.

“The others do not know how to handle this situation, so you are left to your own devices. That puts all of us in danger. You are brilliant, but you are unpredictable,” Leliana finished. “I want you to be our leader, but I do not yet trust in your ability to do so reliably. Before I ever consider fully handing this organisation over to you, you need to deal with whatever is making you act like this.”

“You mean, aside from all the trauma and the bloodshed you keep throwing at me, and the fact that we are fighting a templar army that also probably includes all of the people who murdered my family in front of my very eyes-”

“Asha, that is _exactly_ what I’m talking about,” Leliana said, cutting her off almost impatiently. “You are _in pain_. But you never talk about it. To anyone. And now you are shouting at me, like I made that decision for you.”

“I - maybe - maybe I don’t want to talk about it.”

Leliana sighed. “Most of us cannot comprehend the level of suffering you have lived through. There will never come a point when we will think this somehow is easy for you. We gave you the option to refuse the role of Inquisitor for that very reason - but, frankly, things changed the moment you chose to take it.” She fixed her with a look that Asha wished she could shy away from, “the atrocities you have suffered are not your fault, but I am now charging you with the responsibility of dealing with them in a healthy way.”

Asha found she couldn’t speak, so she just looked at her.

“The others want to give you time. They think it is kind to wait and let you come to them for help,” Leliana said, and her words were still not gentle. “They hope that now that you are happy again, perhaps it will last. But I do not have that luxury. As you’ve pointed out, we are about to take on a templar army. We are fighting the monster that Alexius made the oculara for. I _need_ to be able to trust you to handle that, and use our people wisely. I can’t say I’m particularly convinced.”

“What…” Asha swallowed, and tried again. “What would you suggest?”

“Honestly, what do you want?” the Nightingale asked, “do you want revenge? I can give you all kinds of brutal, bloody revenge. Do you want freedom, to no longer be a soldier in this war? Because we can grant you that as well. But if you seek peace… that’s not something I, personally, can give you. You are the only person who can guarantee that for yourself. If I can help, I will. But this is an issue we simply cannot avoid any longer,” she leant back, “I am saying this as your friend, you realise.”

Asha snorted unceremoniously. “We really need to work on your definition of ‘friendliness’.”

The Nightingale quirked a small, unrepentant smirk, “Would you prefer to be plied with lukewarm assurances that everything will get better unaided? I’m not the person to go to for that. You’ve almost died, twice. I call it ‘friendly’ to want you still living."

“Oh.” that was actually sweet, in its own murder-y, assassin-y way. Leliana was right, this was as kind as she tended to get. Asha felt a little like she wanted to cry, and also a little bit like she wanted to hit her, but she could also recognise when the Nightingale pulled back, no longer wishing to grind Asha’s heart _directly_ under her boot. “You said the same thing to me, in the future, you know, only even less tactfully. You called my emotions a ‘hindrance’.”

“I do not consider them a hindrance, but neither will I hold them up as a strength. I won’t let our run of successes blind us to the risk you currently pose, both to yourself and others. We could fail, and we could also lose you,” Leliana gave her a hard look, “it is a cruelty to let this go on unremarked. You shouldn’t suffer just because your choices haven’t hurt you yet.”

“Oh,” Asha said, again, kind of at a loss how to respond. Maybe Leliana was right, though she certainly could stand to sugar coat it a little. “I’m not going to say ‘thank you’ or anything,” she said finally. “Not for,” she gave a vague hand gesture, “that.”

“And I would not expect you to,” Leliana replied smoothly, “though this, perhaps, might earn your gratitude.” 

She reached over to the side of the table to reach a stack of paper that was piled high at the corner, sliding it over to sit in front of Asha. “This is every report I have on the Therinfall Redoubt templars, and on Samson - I was already collating it. It mentions Denam by name. If you want to find out more about the people who hurt Clan Lavellan, I can give you access to all the material I have so far. As Inquisitor, you are welcome to read all of the reports I have on the Templar Order.”

“Oh,” Asha really needed to find something new to say, but this particular offer hit her with a new wave of fresh horror, for an entirely different reason.

_Oh gods,_ she thought, looking down on the stack of papers that, for all she knew, could be written in a spymaster’s cipher, or in simply common. How could she not have...? But Josie always read aloud from her own notes in meetings, and Cullen only ever spoke in relevant statistics and ‘key takeaways’, rather than handing out reports. Cassandra had written every missive to the Inquisition’s headquarters unasked when they were on missions, as if it was automatically her responsibility. _Fuck!_ Asha cursed inwardly, _Why did I never even consider this when I was thinking of reason not to lead the Inquisition…?_

“Is something the matter, Inquisitor?”

“Um…” Asha squeaked, as she looked up at her unforgiving spymaster. “Is now a good time to mention that I… can’t read?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, just stating for the record that Leliana's advice for dealing with Asha's tranquility symptoms are delivered in character, and they are not endorsed as being in any way legitimate, especially in their delivery. Maybe Machiavellian spymasters aren't the best people to be giving therapy, especially given Leliana's slightly mercenary motives...
> 
> This was a long! chapter! I've been trying to plot Asha's templars arc, which means this became a little exposition heavy in the middle! Denam is obviously the shithead templar that you encounter and can put on trial if you complete 'Champions of the Just'. In this version of his character, he was sent to Kirkwall as temporary reserves when Meredith decided she needed more Order forces called into the city to control the unrest. He arrived at A Very Inopportune Moment, and witnessed the downfall of the Circles, along with a lot of blood magic. In the gap between then and being reassigned to Therinfall Redoubt... this happened. More will be explained in time!


	36. Chapter Thirty-Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daily life in Skyhold.

“You can’t _read!_ ”

Varric, predictably, was the person who had taken this news the hardest. If only because it revealed her polite interest in his reading recommendations and offers of lending out from his personal library to be precisely that: _extremely_ polite interest.

“Why would _I_ need to read common? Or write it!” Asha wailed, fighting the urge to bury her head in her hands. Her hangover had reached the ‘must put food into my stomach now before I die’ stage, and she was sat in the tavern with her friends, bemoaning this latest embarrassing lack of skill with a plate of cheap fried food, all while studiously avoiding Solas’ eyes. By the gods, it was embarrassing to vomit in front of someone and then be proven illiterate, all in under four hours. “I come from an _oral_ culture. I barely interacted with the human cities. We had people who could read the basics, understand numbers and how _shemlen_ do sums for transactions, but it wasn’t that... important. I was too busy learning to speak four languages!”

“ _Four_ languages?” Solas asked, mildly interested.

“I can speak Nevarran because we strayed pretty close to the border, and I can sort of speak the Starkhaven dialect,” Asha muttered. That _particular_ endeavour was because Ellana had heard that a pretty Starkhaven Prince had moved to Kirkwall, and wanted someone to learn the language with her so that she could woo him whenever their paths _inevitably_ crossed. “Guys, why do you think I always avoid those poor Requisitions Officers like they’ve got the plague? I have no idea what any of their stupid charts even say!”

“But… but what about your history?” Varric seemed genuinely at a loss, and she supposed he was a dwarf. She knew that their culture was built around the Shaperate and the records of people’s ancestors.

“We _tell_ our history,” she sighed, “it’s a collective memory that we honour with each generation. We remember it all, then pass it down from person to person.”

“But, then what happens, if you lose everyone -”

“Yeah well, that happened, didn’t it? I’m the Chronicler for Clan Lavellan, now, as is every person who ever stayed by our fire,” she fixed him with a look. “Do you think the story of my clan would’ve had any more chance of surviving if it had all been written down in a book that ended up mouldering on the forest floor somewhere?”

“But - but - books! Fiction!”

“We have ballads and storytelling. It’s better when the tale meanders a bit. I don't like how you guys only have one version of everything.”

“How do you send _letters_?”

Asha shrugged, “You say the message you want, and trust the messenger to remember it and pass it on.”

“What about _sexy letters_?”

“Oh, well… I don’t know actually. But my sister did once get proposed to by a man in Clan Sabrae, and it was… um, well, announced to all of us? Not that Ellana even blushed.”

“How did you not think to mention it? You stand in front of a map in every meeting!”

“I know what Thedas _looks like_ , Varric.” Asha was vaguely affronted by that one. "Plus," she added sarcastically, "they have these little markers that they move around while they're talking, it's so very helpful..."

“It’s just… I mean… Even Hawke used to do research!”

“Didn’t Hawke just throw herself into every problem and work it out afterwards?”

“How… how did you hide this from me for so long?!”

“I don’t get what the big deal is! It’s not just me! Solas is one of the cleverest people we know,” Asha said, waving to him from where he sat across the table from her, “and he doesn’t learn it from books, _or_ write it down. Everything _he_ knows is word-by-mouth. It’s all ‘oh, my mate from four thousand years ago says that that hero from an ancient battle was actually a merciless turncoat, trust me on this’ and ‘did you know this spell is more powerful if you cast in the space between dusk and full nighttime, a spirit of unnecessarily theatrical casting let it slip once when I was strolling around in the Fade’.”

“Is that what you think I sound like, _lethallan_? I’m hurt.”

“So am I!” Dorian piped up, leaning back from where he sat one table over, “ _he’s_ the cleverest person you know?”

Asha grinned, “ _’one of’_ , Dorian. Hopefully that keeps your ego more or less intact.”

Varric sighed heavily, clearly deeming her a lost cause. “So what’s the Nightingale wanna do about your little problem?”

“She wants Josephine to hire me a teacher,” Asha grumbled, “someone discrete who isn’t likely to tell anyone about it, given that the whole of Orlais already thinks I’m some kind of uncivilised barbarian. Apparently this piece of gossip may completely discredit me.”

“One of us could always teach you.”

“Oh no, no no no,” Asha laughed at Varric’s suggestion, “I know you all too well, ser. _You_ would teach me using smutty literature, and I don’t quite need to know that many ways to write ‘cock’,” she pointed to Dorian, “you would teach me with some dire arcane academia tome as dry as the Western Approach, and you,” she pointed at Solas, and then shrugged, “well, you’d probably go have high tea with the spirit of whoever invented written language, and then try to explain the moral philosophical principles underlying calligraphy to me while I was still trying to spell my name.”

“ _Ouch._ ” said Varric, rubbing his chest like he’d just been shot.

“Whoever could’ve predicted you’d prove such a cruel mistress, Inquisitor Lavellan?” Solas murmured with a small, secretive grin, and by the Gods Asha tried not to blush.

“Oh, I’m so sorry to make light of your vast depths of knowledge, _hahren_ ,” she joked, taking refuge in irreverence, fluttering her eyelashes solely to show how much he _hadn’t_ got her flustered. “Please tell me more of your extensive studies - you are so very, very advanced, compared to little old me. Tell me every secret of the Fade, so that I may write with all the wisdom of the ages.”

Only her plan rather backfired, because from somewhere on the tavern’s upper floor, she heard Sera shout, “Andraste’s flaming knickers, GET A FUCKIN’ ROOM!”

“You know,” Varric observed off-handedly, as Asha once more tried to look anywhere but Solas. “The way you just phrased that suggests that you need more than one way to write ‘cock’.”

In the end, Josephine found Asha a teacher from among the Rebel Mages, a short, plump human woman with nut-brown skin and a kindly smile, Sarae, who apparently used to teach the children of the Ferelden Circle their numbers and letters. Varric was incredibly disappointed in her unassuming tutor - it apparently meant he’d been denied the opportunity to observe a real life ‘sexually-charged learning to read’ montage for the second time in his life.

What it did mean, however, was that she needed to get acquainted with the library. Sarae taught her in one of the small adjoining rooms in the upper floors of the tower and, at the age of almost twenty-eight, Asha now had _homework_ to complete. She took to working on it before dinner so that her hunger became cheap motivation for productivity. She tried sitting next to Dorian in his little reading alcove, but she’d never heard such a loud reader: he was constantly humming and hah-ing, and then occasionally ‘tsking’ before he literally took a ink quill and started annotating the pages of the books he didn’t even own, with no small amount of vigour. So instead she started sitting at the other end of Solas’ desk, working opposite him on her exercises in rudimentary Common while he read or sketched in charcoal. She was rationing herself to one glance at him every ten minutes, as her awareness of him seemed to grow more and more every day.

This time, when she looked up, she tried not to jump when her eyes caught his. Gods knew, she had enough practice at pretending it didn’t bother her. Because if there was one thing she’d learned in these last few days, it was that Solas watched her… a lot. She’d only just started noticing now that she was doing it too.

Instead of startling, she gave him a flat, tired smile and prayed that she didn’t start blushing. “Runic languages are stupid,” she muttered, glancing down as she flicked through the basic runes Sarae had wanted her to trace that evening. “I didn’t realise so much of being the Inquisitor would be just sitting in lessons.”

It was true. It was her second week in her new role, and there was no word yet from Hawke - despite the Storm Coast being only four days ride away. They couldn’t really choose their next step until Sidonie and Asha had met, and Asha didn’t leave on any routine work, because she didn’t want to accidentally stand up the Champion of Kirkwall. In this unprecedented stretch of downtime, her only responsibilities were meetings, and lessons. She’d restarted her magic practice, using the flat roof of one of Skyhold’s towers. She also - unbeknown to Solas (or at least without consulting him, because he probably knew what she was doing) - resumed meditation up there, the sounds of the courtyard below a bare whisper that reminded her that she wasn’t totally alone among the clouds as she tried, desperately, to will herself to stillness, rarely succeeding. Although Leliana had been a bitch about it, once the sharp edge of her words had dulled, Asha had decided she was right. She needed to stick to the measures she’d chosen to keep herself in check, and meditation was the most obvious one to pursue. But for some reason, she didn’t want to do it in Solas’ company, at the moment.

And it was a reason she couldn’t pick her finger on, separate from, well, the obvious. Which was that, unless she had work to distract herself, her brain was sincerely struggling to keep quiet around him.

She’d also resumed strength training with Cassandra, down in the courtyard. Their audience was somewhat less critical - Cullen’s troops now trained in the valley outside of the castle - but also about three times as big, as traders flooded into Skyhold's marketplace to cater to the castle's growing numbers. Asha tried to ignore the masses eager to catch a glimpse of the former-tranquil Inquisitor, but it was hard. She could only hope that it didn’t shatter people’s confidence in the Inquisition entirely: while she knew she was improving, she didn’t improve prettily. She wasn’t like Cassandra, or fucking _Cullen rutherford_ , who finished a training session misted with a fine sheen of sweat that just made them look better, all glossy like they’d just applied some sexy varnish. No, she was cursed to be forever red-faced, drowning in sweat, and close to tears, regardless of whether the actual exercises left her quite as floored as they used to.

A few days into their resumed scheduled, when they’d finished her standard round of torture, she’d lurched up to standing, saying, “I need to talk to you about something.”

Cassandra looked at her, wiping her stupid sexy sheen of sweat from her brow, “yes?”

“I need to learn how to fight templars,” Asha blurted, too exhausted to muster a tactful delivery.

Cass looked a little shocked, so Asha continued, “when you first proposed we do… this,” she gestured at her sad, sweaty form, “you mentioned that we wouldn’t practice any actual fighting unless I asked, and unless I wanted to. I think, with a red templar army now in the mix, it’s time to take you up on the offer?”

“Asha, we don’t…”

“Yes, we do,” Asha said firmly, “I keep panicking in situations because I don’t feel like I can take anyone in a one-on-one fight - well, anyone who isn’t Alexius, sitting with his ass on a throne with no armour, gloating. I need to learn how to fight soldiers with templar training, otherwise they could probably squish me to dust once they get close enough to fall out of spell range. So, do you think…?”

Cassandra pursed her lips for a second, before answering, “Seekers are trained a little differently from templars, but I can certainly get you started. We may - that is - we may need to bring in outside help-”

“-Let’s just try and get me able to hold my own first,” Asha gave a weak smile, “gods know how long that might take.”

So the next morning, after they finished her strength training, Asha had a fifteen minute break to lie in the courtyard, contemplating her poor life choices, before she willingly consented to her first two hour sparring session with the formidable force that was Cassandra Pentaghast. She used a plain wooden quarterstaff, Cassandra a wooden training sword and shield. Asha had some training in close combat, from fighting with Mahanon and the other hunters. Her knowledge was enough for her to entertain delusions of skill for roughly two minutes, before Cass tackled her into the dirt - a movement that had nothing to do with their practice weapons, meaning it hurt like a bitch. 

Cassandra helped her up, as Asha spat dirt out of her mouth, and said simply: “again.”

Battered and extremely bruised, Asha left the sparring ring, remembering with amused fondness that moment in Haven when she’d thought she was dead. She was surprised to find herself walking past Cullen, who was watching the two of them leave the sparring ring with an unreadable expression. She couldn't work out what he was thinking... probably nothing complimentary. Perhaps he was just unnerved that she’d now be learning how to take down templars - although Asha couldn’t imagine he’d seen much here to leave him worried on that front.

As she passed, he murmured over his shoulder at her, “Cassandra leaves the lower left side of her torso vulnerable, with practice shields that weigh less than she’s used to.”

Asha blinked at him, surprised at his interjection, and then snorted a laugh. “Commander,” she grinned, “that is one of the most… optimistic pieces of advice I’ve ever been given.” It wasn’t like she had a hope of _hitting_ Cass anytime soon in these exchanges.

But the next day, she _did_ manage to wind the Seeker, jabbing the butt of her staff into her stomach when the opening he’d predicted showed itself and she instinctively took it. She let out a terrified yelp at her success, immediately running to Cassandra’s aid, and looked up to find him in the same spot again, fighting to keep a small grin on his face. She confessed to Cassandra about having help afterwards. It frankly felt like cheating.

Between strength training, fighting lessons, magic practice, and then fucking Common, Asha’s days were simply becoming a routine examination of her various failures. She’d heard that she was getting a Knight Enchanter tutor soon, and supposed she could only be grateful they’d decided to outsource that training to someone other than Vivienne. But there was no denying it was a little dull. Everything had become just… so domestic.

“I’m sure we’ll be off adventuring in new climes soon, _lethallan_ ,” said Solas with a gentle smile, as if hearing her thoughts. 

Asha’s treacherous brain made specific note of the use of ‘we’ as she hurriedly looked back at her papers. _Please stop!_ she begged herself. Something had changed since she'd woken up in the library that day, and it seemed that people who'd been safe from flights of fancy before were rapidly becoming... not so safe. She could see exactly the route her mind wanted to lead her down, and was desperately trying to pull herself back from the brink.

“Ahh, Asha! I hoped I’d find you here!” Asha looked up from pretending to look at her notes to see Josephine bustling into the library, a long package wrapped in paper in her hands. “You do not yet have any official chambers, so this was delivered to my office.”

Solas raised a single questioning eyebrow as the ambassador deposited the parcel on the desk in front of her. Asha gave a little hum of excitement as she unfolded the paper, revealing a bolt of sky blue linen along with several skeins of thread in the same colour. “Ooh!” Josie cooed, “it matches your eyes!”

Asha grinned, “I asked for it from the woman in the market after practice this morning, but didn’t want to get it dirty. I’m going to make a dress with it.”

“Oh! Goodness, Asha,” Josie bit her lip, “you do know that we… have tailors? And we can pay for you to visit them, you realise? You should’ve been collecting a salary this whole time. You don’t have to make your own clothes.”

Asha tried her best not to snort in the face of Josephine’s gentle, horrified concern at the idea of a homespun dress. _Rich people_. “I want to make it, Josie,” she said, “it was recently pointed out to me that I haven’t done anything fun in awhile. I used to make dresses all the time, and I’m in desperate need of some new clothes.”

“And this is fun?” Josie asked tentatively, and when Asha nodded to confirm, she smiled, dimples showing, “if you need more fabric, or more clothes, you only need to ask! I know Madame de Fer has been desperate to introduce you to her _couturier_. I’m sure he will have a lovely supply of fabric.”

Asha risked a sardonic glance towards Solas, at the expense of Josie’s utter trust in humanity which made her think that that was something even _resembling_ a compliment from the First Enchanter. He answered her with a wry smile, before turning his eyes back down to his book. “Well,” she said, turning back to Josie, “if you think I should? I know you probably need me to look a little better than,” she gestured to her rumpled, oversized requisition shirt, rolled up and crumpled in the sleeves.

“Oh no! Not at all!” Josie looked mortified, “you do not need a new wardrobe to command respect. I mean, yes, we shall need you to get a few gowns, and we should probably commission a designer for Halamshiral before we even get that invitation, for all of the most talented dressmakers get booked up years in advance, and possibly a day dress for meeting dignitaries, and Cassandra was suggesting we commission you new armour, but…”

“I promise to buy lots and lots of new clothes,” Asha interjected hastily with mounting fear. “I'll just... make the dress as well.”

“Wonderful! Oh, but you will look so beautiful in this colour! I don’t think we’ve ever seen you in a dress!”

Asha was not so completely immune to Josephine Montilyet’s charms that such effusive compliments about her hypothetical appearance didn’t leave her blushing. 

“Honestly, I quite like the Inquisitor in breeches,” Solas remarked blandly, his eyes not leaving his book.

“Shush, you!” Asha tutted, certain he must be teasing. “I’ve heard what Dorian has to say about your wardrobe.”

“The ambassador is right though,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, glancing up briefly at her briefly and then returning to his page, a picture of unconcern, “the blue would do wondrous things to your eyes.”

Asha hastily wrapped the paper back round the fabric just for something to do, wishing he wasn’t so unflappable, wishing that he couldn’t speak so coolly, to that point where she doubted whether or not that was even flirting. “I was about to go eat, Josie,” she said, fighting to keep her voice level and unflustered, just the same as his. “Would you like to join me for dinner?”

“Oh, of course, Inquisitor,” Josie smiled. “That would be lovely.”

“You want to come?” she asked Solas, looking straight at him, almost as if it was a dare. _Oh fuck,_ she thought, with the benefits of immediate hindsight, _probably could’ve picked a much better set of words_.

“...No, Inquisitor, I think there’s more I need to finish up here,” he replied, after a brief hestiation. And this, Asha thought, was precisely the problem. _This_ was what made her doubt everything he said and did.

She was pretty certain, at this point, that Solas had been flirting with her ever since she’d told him their feud over Redcliffe was at an end. Probably before then. Maybe. 

It had begun small, with those little jibes said in a subtly different tone of voice that almost tangibly slid across her skin. The teasing they shared had taken on a different edge. And then there was the... the drawings. Asha wasn't a vain person, no matter how badass she looked with an undercut. She didn't think she had a face worth drawing _quite_ so much. And while Solas' idle studies of her could be blamed on their close proximity, the sketches didn't strike her as... unmotivated. Numerous rough poses of her engrossed in her work, with brow furrowed and a finger to her lips; of her looking down over the balcony as she talked with Dorian, face creased with laughter; and in particular the one when she'd fallen asleep in her book, on the day of her second sparring session with Cass, face peaceful and hair spread across the desk.

They were lovely. And he always showed them to her after, so it wasn't like it was a creepy, unspoken secret. But he never fucking _did_ anything about it. She had no idea what reaction he wanted from her. He kept initiating stuff he never bloody _finished_. What was the point of stealing glances and complimenting a person’s eyes, if you then flat out refused an opportunity to get to know them better? Did he like playing at attraction, practising his courting techniques? Maybe he did, but he didn't seem to be someone who would jeopardise friendship over such things. And Asha wasn't either. She didn’t like being played with, and wasn't interested in whatever convoluted dance he was trying to lead her in. It left her feeling confused and prone to overthinking, two things she already had in spades.

“Your loss,” she told him breezily, directing a bright grin at the ambassador that she couldn’t help but hope rankled him. _She_ was going to have fun, even if he refused to. She took three steps towards her, and then stopped, pausing to think,“And will you both please stop calling me that?”

“Inquisitor? But it’s not like ‘Herald’, is it?” Josephine said, tentatively, “it’s a title you chose, one you earned, no question about it.”

“Maybe so, but I still prefer my _name_ ,” Asha said, with feeling. She sighed, biting her lip, before admitting, “Besides, it keeps giving me flashbacks to Varric’s drinking game. Leaves me queasy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a silly chapter ^_^ I realised I haven't done much of the "chilling in Skyhold" stuff that I love in other fics. A lot of what I'm thinking of as Act 2 in my head is going to be different to the Haven section of this story - it will focus on non-canonical content, and skip over some of the missions that are less key to the plot! I know a lot of my Haven stuff was retreading familiar ground, but I'm feeling more confident now.
> 
> Plus, I feel like I couldn't throw my Inquisitor into a templar/mage Hinterlands war and like... not comment on it? A little?
> 
> Author's note: Varric's disappointment regarding the lack of "‘sexually-charged learning to read’ montages" in his life refers to the fact that in this fic's worldstate, Hawke romanced Isabela. Which means that, regardless of whether or not she taught Fenris to read with the gift she gave him, it didn't get to be romantically charged bonding activity (which is a shame, I love a good mentorship).


	37. Chapter Thirty-Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha meets the Champion of Kirkwall.

“My my, look at you! Aren’t you just as cute as a button?”

If those words had come from anyone other than Sidonie Hawke, Asha might have considered punching them in the face. As it was, she simply floundered for a response, mouth slightly open.

There was nothing ‘cute’ or ‘button-like’ about the Champion of Kirkwall. No, Hawke was built more like a brick wall. One which - Asha couldn’t help but think, as she craned her neck to take in the woman’s full height - lots of people had probably wanted to climb in their time.

Hawke loomed over her in height, giving even Iron Bull a run for his money. She had dark curls that coasted down her back like a lion’s mane, thick and yet somehow weightless, buoyant like smoke. Her body was taut with muscle and she had a sword strapped to her back that Asha was terrified might genuinely be as tall as she was - well, that was exaggerating things, but it was at least a good half of her height. The Champion was umber skinned with freckles across her cheekbones, the warm tones of her skin brought out by her deep crimson lipstick and the tattooed blood smear across her twice-broken nose - Asha really thought Varric had made that particular detail up. 

And there was one thing he hadn’t mentioned at all: a thick, whitened line of scar tissue bisected Hawke’s left eye, leaving the pupil pale and unseeing. The Champion saw Asha’s eyes travel over it and grinned a sinful smile. “I wanted to get an eye patch,” she confided, with a wink of her good eye, “but Isabela said that was too much of a pirating cliche.” 

The woman strode over to her and held out her hand to shake, “Sidonie Hawke. You can call me Sid. All of the pretty women do.”

Varric chuckled from behind his friend’s back, “spending this much time with Rivaini has made you… worse.”

“Please Varric,” Sid said with a coy sideways glance, in a smooth voice like silk, “everyone knows that Amell blood ages like a fine wine: I’d have gotten here all by myself. You should see Bethany - rebellion has done _wonderful_ things for her complexion.”

“Um, hi,” Asha stuck out her hand - fuck, she’d forgotten to check whether or not it was sweaty before grasping the Champion’s, “Asha Lavellan. It’s - well - it’s kind of an honour to meet you!”

“Aren’t you sweet,” Sid smiled, and the compliment seemed sincere, not patronising. “How are you finding the hero business? Wish I’d had the stability of a contracted position, rather than the joy of being everyone and their mother’s emergency contact.”

“Oh, um, it’s… fine? I guess?” Asha realised her answer should be more impressive, or at least confident. But Sidonie’s wry gaze seemed to be doing funny things to her stomach, and also her mouth, making it impossible to keep the truth in. “Honestly, I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

“Ha!” Hawke threw back her head and laughed, “Maker, I remember _those_ days.”

“I can see why maybe you packed it in. I’m mostly just staying for the castle.”

“A woman after my own heart,” Sid grinned. “Skyhold certainly puts my estate to shame. I still prefer Izzy’s ship, though.”

“In all seriousness - thank you for coming to meet with us. I know it means a lot for you to come out of hiding.”

“Corypheus is my mess, and Maker knows it was one I thought I’d cleaned up admirably,” Sid grumbled, moving over to join her by the edge of the tower, looking down in to the courtyard below. “Now he turns out to apparently be just another job I’ve botched. If this asshole has somehow managed to crawl his way out into daylight, I’m more than happy to stuff him back down into the void.”

“You met him once before? Fought him?”

“Fought and _killed_ , to be specific. I know he’s an ugly bastard, but it seems like all that lyrium must be good for something, because I distinctly remember taking his head off. Maybe it grew back spikier than before.”

“Can you tell me what happened? Varric’s told me the story, but anything else you can offer would be amazing.”

“I'll leave the tales to him, but I can give you something better: Corypheus’ plan. Last time, he gained power through manipulating Grey Wardens - possessing them through his connection to darkspawn and the Blight.”

“Grey Wardens?” Asha frowned, “but-”

“‘But Sid, all Grey Wardens have mysteriously gone walkabout these last few months, coinciding with that big-ass rip in the sky?’” Sid finished for her, “yes, I’d noticed that as well. Or rather, my pals who took the Grey noticed, and fed it back to me.”

The Champion sighed, looking out across the landscape, “Last time round, Corypheus got into their heads, messed with their minds and turned them against each other. If the Wardens have disappeared, they could have fallen under his control again.”

“Blackwall seems fine,” Asha said, “but then he doesn’t seem to have much contact with the Wardens at all - maybe it’s something that can only be passed on through meeting with others, or with the Elder One himself?”

“No bloody clue, honestly. My Warden friend though… he might have more answers. This is what I came to you to talk about. My friend was investigating something unrelated for me, but he’s reached out to let me know that he found something. When Varric’s letter came the next day, it felt like fate, or whatever it is that us heroes are governed by. And with you being who you are, I-” Sid stopped for a second, and looked sideways at Asha, “...how have you found it here? Being what you are?”

“An... elf?”

“A mage - a former tranquil. I’m amazed no one’s tried to kill you, honestly.”

“I mean, lots of people have tried, just not in the Antivan Crows sense, I suppose,” Asha said with a weak smile. Then she looked out across Skyhold, giving the question serious thought, “being a mage here, it actually doesn’t feel so bad. It was a bit shit in the beginning, to be honest, but looking back I realise I’ve not actually come up against much resistance at all. The Inquisition seemed to prioritise the mages as an alliance even before I stated it as a condition by which I would stay. And Cassandra now says that they’re integrating well with the rest of the Inquisition - any discrimination is being punished, and nothing _seems_ to be on fire, so I assume the situation is under control. I’m sure some people are assholes about it behind closed doors, but I’ve only actually had to punch _one_ person.”

“Gosh, the days when I only had to punch one person were rare successes. The days when things weren't on fire, too,” Sid said, with a wistful sigh. “So… you’re happy here? You don’t feel... trapped?”

“I mean, a little,” Asha admitted quietly, looking down to the anchor as she flexed her hand, “but it’s not anybody’s fault.” She never quite knew how she felt about the anchor, which gave her freedom but at the cost of a cause to pledge herself to.

“You sure? No one’s causing you trouble? Not that angry Seeker Varric tells me so much about in his letters, or Knight Captain Rutherford?”

“Um… I think he prefers ‘Commander’, now?” Asha replied, unable to believe such words even came out of her mouth. 

“I’m sure he does.”

Asha wondered why Hawke was asking - if she knew the woman’s motivations, she might have a better chance of giving her the answer she needed to hear to want to help them. 

“To be honest, I’ve had more trouble from First Enchanter Vivienne, if only because I don’t think she likes me very much,” she told her tentatively, “Cassandra and Cullen, they might not like all of my decisions, but they seem to respect the chain of command. They honour my orders - now that I’ve chosen to put our lot in with the mages, they’re making the best of it. Why do you ask?”

“Putting an 'Andraste-touched' mage at the top of the Inquisition was a bold move, particularly for the likes of Cullen Rutherford.”

“Do you have something against the Commander? I know you knew him, well, before-”

“Well, he was a templar who lived in Kirkwall, which means I’m inclined to dislike him on principle,” Hawke replied breezily, a woman after Asha’s own heart. “A few years back I’d have been inclined to say that he had all the backbone of a lumpy custard, but then he stood with me in the end, against that bitch Meredith. Still, helping me stop the Right of Annulment doesn’t make up for all the years he turned a blind eye while his Commander literally got possessed. I’m inclined not to trust him.”

Asha listened to the speech with avid interest - Varric was the only insight she had into what Cullen’s role in Kirkwall had been, and he tended to err towards a diplomatic version of events that avoided blame. She thought it might be because he felt personally responsible for uncovering the red lyrium artefact that was now a sword in Samson’s possession.

“I gather he had some kind of personal problem that Meredith exploited - a big one,” Sidonie continued. And then she shrugged, “But I lost my brother, and then my sister, and then my mother, and all that trauma didn’t magically blind me to templar brutality, so I’m not sure what I think about that as an excuse.”

Varric cleared his throat, “I think that’s one for the Commander to answer himself.”

“No doubt it is, Most Revered Mother Tethras,” Sid threw back over her shoulder with an eye roll. “If the man ever had a voice he dared speak with.” She turned back to Asha, “but you say he’s changed?”

“Um…” Asha genuinely didn’t know how to respond, “I didn’t know him before. He seems to have… mellowed out, maybe? He’s… gods… he’s honoured all of the boundaries I set out for him, and he’s never made me feel _unwelcome_? I mean, he was a bit of an idiot when I met him, but apparently I'm the aggressive one in our relationship. I ‘stare daggers’ at him.” She saw Varric give her a look for throwing his words back at him.

“That’s it?! You haven’t… hit him? Punched him repeatedly?” 

Asha smiled, gesturing to herself, “even if I’ve wanted to - which, um, I don’t think I have, not really - I think I’m a little less qualified than you are.”

“You haven’t even _wanted_ to?!”

“Like I said before, Curly’s behaviour has been rather gentleman-ly towards our glorious leader.” 

“Maker, the perks of a proper title,” Sid said to the heavens. “So what you’re saying is, he’s never shouted ‘abomination’ in your face or tried to have you killed?”

“...No?” Asha ran a hand across her face, “fuck, templars set a low bar for human decency.”

“Fucking tell me about it,” Sid gave her a taut smile, “but if he’s not doing that, then yes, he’s definitely ‘mellowed out’.” She used air quotation marks for emphasis.

That caught Asha’s attention, sent her stomach dipping a couple of inches in reflexive terror. “ _Really?_ ”

“He was a poster boy fanatic, the first time I met him. Made Aveline’s definition of lawkeeping - which is pretty beige - look positively seditious.”

“Aw come on, Hawke, he got better even in the time you knew him!” Varric said.

“And I’m supposed to believe everyone came out of the Kirkwall rebellion smelling of roses?” Sid countered. “What happened changed everyone. I can hope that it’s all for the better but...”

“...Kirkwall,” finished Varric with a sigh.

“He hasn’t seemed… fanatical?” Asha offered tentatively, inserting herself back into the conversation, “I mean, he’s definitely still loyal to the Order, and that scared me, to begin with. But since he accepted that there was more chance of Cass renouncing Andraste than there was of me working with them, he’s honestly been pretty alright about it all.”

Sid cocked her head, “My, such... lukewarm praise.”

“I’m being… honest. I can’t say I trust him either, but...” Asha shrugged, “I’m trying this new thing where I try and not be awful about him just on principle. Bear in mind, I’m only in my second week.”

“Ha!” Hawke grinned at that, “if you’re giving him a chance, you’re a better woman than me. My capacity for that wore out long ago.”

“So… why are you even asking?”

“There’s a problem I can foresee…” Hawke replied mysteriously, scratching her nose, before straightening, back to business. “My informant. He’s going to be hiding out in an old smuggler’s cave near Crestwood. I’ve asked him if he’s ok with us meeting him there and he said it was fine. He actually wants to meet you quite a bit. But I wanted to see if you were trustworthy first - I don’t give up my friends lightly.”

_Which meant that answering her questions honestly was the right way to go,_ Asha though with relief, glad that she had been not entirely fucked up her first Inquisitorial task. She wasn’t sure you could sweet talk a woman like Hawke, even if you tried.

Instead, she offered what she could: sincerity. “Your informant will be completely safe with us,” she said, without hesitation, “I promise.”

Sidonie and Varric walked into the tower, to take whatever wayward route through the castle they required to sneak her out again. The plan was to meet in Crestwood in two weeks’ time, when Sid’s informant made it back from wherever he’d been. Asha had hoped that things would move a little quicker - she was eager to get out into the world again, her instinctive need for travel beginning to feel like a persistent itch.

She made her way to the tavern for lunch, reviewing the conversation to report to the war room in their next meeting that afternoon. How much did she want to edit out? Would it be unseemly to grill Sid on Cullen Rutherford the Templar’s character, the next time they met? 

She was so deep in thought as she started climbing down the battlements that she jumped a mile when she reached the courtyard and nearly bumped head first into the Commander himself, walking the other way.

“Inquisitor, my apologies,” Cullen said, awkwardly rearranging the full tray of food he was taking back to his office before it tipped from his hands.

“Oh, no, that was my fault,” she replied guiltily, trying not to make it obvious, as she was looking at him, that she was calibrating all the new information Sid had offered up. “I was thinking about something - I wasn’t looking where I was going. Are you working through lunch?”

“We’ve just got news that a group of scouts has gone missing in the Fallow Mire again,” he told her glumly.

“ _Again_? Is this a… thing that happens often?”

“Unfortunately, yes. We lost contact with them while fleeing Haven, messengers have only just re-established communications. We wanted to know what the situation was before we acted, and, well...”

“...And we were waiting for Hawke to show?” Asha asked.

“Pretty much,” he admitted. “We wanted to see what might be a priority for your attentions.”

“Well I’ve met with her now, haven’t I?”

“Ah,” Cullen remarked, looking at her knowingly. He pitched his voice a little lower, leaning in slightly, “and how did that go? What did you think of Hawke?”

Asha blinked, faced with the echo of the same question Sid had just asked about him, like she was some go-between for two sulking children having a fight and being asked to pick a side or pass notes.

_Well you see, Commander, she was just asking if you were still an abomination killing fanatic, and apparently there’s a ‘still’ in there, which I’m not entirely sure what to make of!_ She realised she’d been staring at him a beat too long, so scrambled for an answer that wouldn't be so needlessly cruel and tactless. 

“I would climb that woman like a tree!” she blurted, stupidly. Then clapped a hand over her mouth, wincing a little - apparently 'tactless' was all that was on offer, but it came in different flavours.

The Commander’s expression, however, showed only mild amusement. “You and half of Kirkwall, I imagine.”

“She is… very tall,” Asha replied, succinctly, then coughed. “I can see why you lot wanted her to fight Corypheus rather than me. She gave the impression of being very competent, and that sword is very big.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Asha. You’re just as competent as she is.”

Asha thoughts drifted back to Sidonie Hawke's muscles. “ _If only._ ”

“Given that it's Hawke we're talking about, I’m not _entirely_ sure it’s a compliment." 

“Hey!” came a dry voice from the shadowed recesses of the one of the courtyard arches close by. “Have you something to say about my wife?”

Asha turned her head to see a tawny skinned woman walk gracefully out of the shadows, wearing a long, navy blue coat with far too many buckles over a white shirt and tight fitting breeches. Her dark hair was tucked neatly under a red patterned scarf, and gold glinted in her ears and in a stud on her full bottom lip. 

“Isabela,” Cullen said in a flat, resigned tone, and Asha thought he heard him mutter, “maker preserve me” under his breath.

“Oh, hello,” Asha said weakly, feeling rather like trapped prey as the woman sauntered up to them both. She knew Isabela as a rather… um… one-note character from Varric’s stories, but even his stories did not really prepare her for the living, breathing woman in front of her. There was something sinuously predatory about the way the pirate carried herself, and Asha couldn’t help but be both impressed and extremely intimidated. She cast a panicked glance at Cullen, who gave her a helpless look back, like he didn’t know what she was doing here either.

“So: you feel like Sid isn’t up to scratch, soldier boy,” Isabela said, before glancing to Asha, “and you, most revered Inquisitor Lavellan, like her ‘big sword’ and want to climb her ‘like a tree’-” 

“Oh gods, I’m so sorry, I really didn’t mean anything by it-”

“Asha, really, you needn’t worry on _Isabela’s_ account-”

“- You keep blushing like that and I suppose I might be willing to share.” The other woman smirked, raking her gaze from Asha’s toes all the way to the top of her head with a somehow tangible force. “As red as strawberries - my goodness, I could just eat you up.”

“Isabela,” Cullen said, a warning note in his voice, while Asha just floundered there in panic.

“ _Cullen_.” the pirate replied, grinning unrepentantly.

“What are you even doing here?”

“Hawke can’t show her face, but some of us quite like to know what we’re being dragged into, and can walk around with less adoring fans noticing our presence,” Isabela glanced around the courtyard and shrugged. “I was just taking a little stroll around your… operation.”

“Ok, how did you manage to make even that sound dirty?” Asha said, genuinely interested.

Isabela laughed, “you liked that, did you? Just one of the many talented things I can do with my tongue.”

“Isabela.”

“ _Cullen_.”

“If you are worried about Hawke’s wellbeing, we'd be happy to give you a full tour? You could meet my other advisors, ” Asha interrupted when her brain started working again, if only to save them from a circular conversation that would result in Cullen’s meal being stone cold. “I want Sidonie to trust us, and I can promise we have nothing to hide.”

“My, such manners,” the woman smiled at her. 

“Just doing my diplomat proud,” Asha replied. “Sid’s offer of an alliance is important to us, and you’re important to her. I’m happy to offer whatever helps you to trust us.”

“Oh, that’s very kind. But no, sweetness, I think I’ll pass. I’ve seen more than enough.”

“You’re sure?” 

“That makes me worry which locks in Skyhold are now broken,” Cullen muttered.

“Honestly, Cullen, so many of the doors are mouldering, I don’t think it would’ve taken the effort of breaking them in the first place,” Asha pointed out. At least, she hoped Isabela hadn’t actually broken into anything, otherwise Leliana might put a bounty on her head. She turned back to the rogue, “I know Varric kept Sidonie a secret from us for a reason, but please believe that we're worthy of the trust he's shown by changing his mind on that.”

“ _Some_ of us would rather she didn’t get dragged back into these kinds of situations. Perhaps we think that she’s done enough heroism to last - and ruin - a lifetime.”

“And _some_ of us think that your benchmark for altruism might be a little low,” Cullen replied with asperity, “Corypheus threatens all of us, Isabela.”

“It’s perfectly within your right to be worried. You love her. But Varric shares those fears, and he’s chosen to give us a chance,” Asha replied, ignoring Cullen’s jibe, “we’ll protect Sid in whatever way we can - she’ll be completely safe with us, I promise.”

“Oh sweetness, you shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep,” for a second, the flirtatious persona slipped slightly, and Isabela’s dark eyes looked almost pitying, like she thought Asha naive and breakable. “But Sid was never one to walk away when people needed saving - my life would’ve been a lot easier if that was the case.”

“If that _was_ the case, you’d no doubt be squashed under the Arishok’s boot,” replied Cullen. 

“And then maybe half of Kirkwall would still be alive,” Isabela countered, that haunted look still in her eyes. And then it slipped away, and she smiled easily again, batting her eyelashes, “but Sid just can’t resist a damsel in distress, particularly when she looks quite the way I do.”

“Are you sure we can’t help you in some way? The offer of a tour still stands,” Asha said. “It might ease your mind to meet the rest of our people?”

“Oh, I can think of plenty of ways to ease my mind with you, sweetness, but I believe Sid's waiting for me outside the bounds of your fair establishment, and I’d hate to leave her wanting,” Isabela smiled. “We’ll save the all-access tour of your… assets for a later date.”

“Wow,” Asha said. Genuinely, that tone of voice had to have some kind of supernatural origin. “You do realise that those words would sound absolutely ridiculous in anyone else’s mouth - oh gods, please don’t do anything with that either!”

Cullen cut the woman off just as she opened her mouth, “Isabela-”

“Oh please, _Commander_ , stop ruining my fun just because you wish you could flirt like I can,” Isabela said with a knowing smirk, and Asha watched with confusion as Cullen went a very startling shade of pink. “I’m a very giving person. If you need help with a _certain someone_ , you only need ask...”

“Ohhhh, did he have someone back in Kirkwall?” Asha couldn’t help asking. She was learning all kinds of new things about him today. 

“There’s no one in Kirkwall,” he sputtered, and then froze, seemingly mortified by the full implications of that response.

Seeing his reaction, Isabela crowed with laughter. “oh Maker, that was a bit of a shot in the dark... but it seems like I hit the nail right on the head, didn’t I? Wow… good for you! You were so very _repressed_ back in Kirkwall. It really was bad for your health. I used to dare Bethany to walk through the Gallows naked, just to see if you’d even blink.”

“I… I need to go,” Cullen started to stutter.

“Your food must be getting cold,” Asha offered as an excuse, taking pity on him.

“Oh, poor boy!” Isabela smiled, leaning in to pat him on the shoulder, which he did not seem to like one bit. “Don’t worry Commander, I was just leaving.” She turned to Asha, and then leaned _much further in_ , all the way to whisper in her ear, “Inquisitor, it was a true pleasure.” 

And then, she kissed her cheek, swatted her lightly on the ass, and walked away in a wave of heady perfume, hips swaying as she went.

“Oh… my... gods…” Asha whispered.

“Yes, that’s Isabela,” Cullen said in a bored deadpan, though he didn’t look exactly unruffled by the whole thing. “Are you... ok, Asha?”

“No, no, you don’t understand!” Asha reached down into the back pocket of her trousers, where Isabela’s hand had just been moments ago, and pulled out a folded piece of paper, wondering how the fuck she’d managed to deposit it there without her noticing, and in so little time. “I think I just got given a secret note, but _I can’t fucking read!_ ” 

Cullen frowned as Asha unfolded it, and then handed it to him. “What does it say?” she asked. 

His frown only deepened as read it, before he looked up at her and recited its contents: “ _‘Don’t take Varric to Crestwood.’_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I considered making the summary of this chapter "the author tries to advance her romance plot but gets distracted by a lesbian power couple" - just in case you were wondering whether or not the disaster bi rep in this fic is #ownvoices or not :')
> 
> Sidonie Hawke is not my canonical Hawke (who, surprising absolutely no one, is a mage). She is a character I made for this fic who bears no resemblance to my Hawke, other than being pro-mage and purple allllll the way down. Sid has been a lot of fun to write though!
> 
> I hope everyone's having a good week!! Although I'm still observing lockdown and that's boring, I got lots of good news in the last few days, not the least of which being that the number of comments on 'Eye of the Storm' went over 100, and the kudos went over 125!!! These were amazing milestones to hit - I'm so glad people have been enjoying my first ever fic. I love hearing people's thoughts and feedback. I really enjoy chatting to you all, and I hope you're having a good time with this beast. May the slow burn pacing ever remain the *good* type of frustrating ;) xxxxx


	38. Chapter Thirty-Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fade tongue.
> 
> (I literally can't think of another chapter summary guys, I'm so sorry. At least it lets you know what you're in for).

Whatever everyone else had thought about the Storm Coast, the Fallow Mire was _worse_.

“Gods, what I wouldn’t give to be anywhere but _here_ ,” Asha said aloud, as they approached the third beacon. They’d gone ahead to scout the Avvar holding, but the hordes of dead shambling in front of the door had convinced them that they’d be best timing their attack for the next morning - or what counted for it, here. Slogging through bog meant that her shoes were squelching with every step, and she was concerned she’d never have feeling in her toes again.

“And whose idea was it, to have a productive diversion on the way to Crestwood?” Solas asked with tired but dry amusement. Ahead of them, Bull and Cassandra started scaling the ladder that led up to the raised platform they’d decided to camp on overnight. The ground was so wet around here that Asha swore she could feel it move under her body, the consistency of quicksand.

“We can’t just leave those people trapped,” she muttered, though she had to admit her valiant images of rescue hadn’t involved getting trenchfoot. It had seemed logical to take the two weeks Hawke’s informant needed to travel doing something useful, but… gods. This place was grim.

“How do you think this all happened?” she asked him, looking up at the churning sky, dark blue like a bad bruise. “I mean, walking dead aside, it _must_ be more than a plague, if the weather’s like this constantly. There's some kind of magical imbalance. Maybe it’s something the Fifth Blight did? We’re on the outskirts of the Korcari Wilds, not far from Ostagar. And I heard a lot of stories from other clans about how some kind of curse was laid over the Brecilian Forest by a nature spirit. We’re a little out of the way here, but maybe the effects were felt even this far out across the land?”

She stopped talking, aware that Solas was watching her intently. She’d done that thing again - laying out a magical problem for him to mull over. “All compelling theories,” he said, his expression unreadable.

“Really?” she smiled at him, “saying ‘maybe it’s some bad magic shit we can’t explain’ feels a little lazy, honestly. What do you think it is?”

They’d reached the ladder - he glanced back, looking across the bleak landscape. “I honestly don’t know,” he admitted, a small frown on his face, “the Veil seems thinner here. Perhaps the dead are restless because the spirits that reside within those corpses are not their original occupants. Demonic activity may have simply warped this place. But bloodshed and loss of life weaken the Veil even further, and you are right: the echoes of Ostagar are felt.”

“So, in other words, ‘maybe it’s some bad magic shit we can’t really explain’,” she grinned. He quirked a smile at her in response. She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, not yet climbing. “Goodness, but the Veil seems to be weakening all over the place. We’d better be careful, or all of Thedas could end up being as... joyous as this.”

Solas shook his head, “no. This is a special case. The Veil… falling. it would doubtless cause such brutal change that it would end up inevitably catastrophic for some. But in other places… it could have wondrous consequences. A landscape changed for the better, not warped beyond imagining.”

“Hmmm. I’m not so sure,” she replied. “It must exist for a reason? Not that I think Cass’ Maker put it there to protect us or anything, but I personally quite like having a barrier between me and all those demons that want to snuggle up in my skull.”

“You are scared of the Fade?” he seemed particularly interested in her reaction.

“Please!” she waved her anchored hand at him, “I might not have experienced it the way you have, but I owe _everything_ I currently am to the Fade. And the stories you tell of it… if I was certain I could be safe there, I’d go right this second.” She looked down, wiggling her toes in her waterlogged boots, “particularly if it meant, you know. Not being here.”

“Well, you know-”

“Oi, you two,” Bull’s voice came from the top of the platform, “you want to get gobbled by corpses, or do you want to help the rest of us set up camp?”

“Sorry Bull!” Asha called up. She looked at Solas, gesturing to the ladder, “after you.”

“No, please, ladies first.”

“I have the light source pinned to my fingers, you go.”

“One of you, _please_ ,” came Cassandra’s terse voice from above. Asha let out a small snigger, and pushed Solas at the ladder. Feeling reckless, she whispered, “I promise not to stare at your ass, if that's what you're worried about.” He gave her a long-suffering look, before climbing up to the top while she studiously kept her word, not even sneaking a single peek.

When she followed suit, she found him waiting for her, hand extended to help her right herself. Her stomach did that stupid little flutter again, the one she was desperately trying to fight off. She could feel Cassandra’s overly-curious eyes on them at least, and was thankful that others were finally noticing the signs she’d begun to dismiss as the figments of a wilful imagination. Trying to keep her emotions off her face, she took the offered hand and let him pull her upright, rather than just flopping onto the platform like a beached fish. 

He jerked her forward and upward with confident strength. She found herself on her feet and entirely too close, a spare inch between her body and his. He looked down at her with a small smile that suggested it had been intentional. They were both damp from travelling through the mire, and that was how she knew she was imagining the heat radiating from him. It was also obviously the _only_ reason for why her arms erupted in gooseflesh under her clothes. He held her hand between his. It was such a small gesture, but she felt almost embarrassed to have other people near her witnessing it happen. Like it was private.

She ducked to the side and stepped away, letting go of his hand. Then she hurried over to where they’d left their bedrolls, and began portioning everyone’s belongings out without a second glance.

When she woke up, she was squinting against ice bright sunlight that was so familiar it told her immediately where she was: Haven.

She didn’t remember getting up, or where exactly she’d been sleeping, but she was standing next to Solas, so she guessed that her mind had been a little hazy in her struggle to make it on time to their morning meditation session. That was why she was confused when he led her up the steps towards the Chantry, not away from it.

“Why here?” she asked curiously. He often seemed as eager to avoid the Inquisition as she was.

“Haven is familiar,” he replied, “it will always be important to you. Plus,” he gestured at the bright, clear sky, “it’s a lovely day.”

“It is!” she smiled, raising her face upward and closing her eyes to bask in the light. She was wearing a pale blue dress, not layered up like she normally had to be, even though a light dusting of snow glided through the air. “It’s even warm.” 

“I suppose it is,” he said with a small, indulgent smile, and continued up the steps. She followed without question - falling into step next to him felt natural.

 _Where is everyone?_ she wondered. As if responding to her thought, she immediately heard some far off, distant music float over on the breeze. She saw Solas cast a surprised glance at her, and she smiled. “Everyone must be outside the village. Celebrating?”

“You noticed the lack of people? You made that music?”

“Well, it’s not every day Haven is completely empty. And the music can’t be me, can it?” she said, confused. 

When they got to the doors of the Chantry, Asha halted at the threshold. The inside seemed dark and unwelcoming, shadowed in comparison to the warm buttery sunlight of the outside. Solas frowned at her when she didn’t budge. “I don’t want to go in there,” she told him, folding her arms. “Can’t we stay outside?”

“Ah, my apologies. I wanted to show you your cell, but it seemed imprudent to take you straight there. You told me about how tranquility often involved gaps in your memory - I didn’t want to replicate that here.”

“Why would I want to see my cell?” she asked incredulously.

He gave her a small smile. “I suppose it was needless sentiment on my part - it was the first place we met.”

“Oh,” Asha felt bad for not wanting to go in now, but still turned away from the darkened halls to look out over the village. She didn’t want to move inside, not when the day was so beautiful. “When I was asleep, and you were watching over me and puzzling out the anchor?”

Solas came to stand next to her as she began walking over to the wall where she and Sera had sat the night the Breach was closed. “Not the anchor, _you_. You were a mystery. You still are.”

“Because of the tranquility?”

“I didn’t know about the tranquility, then,” he reminded her. “The way you spoke of the anchor… it was like you knew something about it. I ran every test I could imagine, searched the Fade, yet found nothing to explain your words.”

 _You could've undressed me,_ she thought, and for once the Gods were kind and stopped her from simply blurting it out loud.

“The anchor is the only reason I can ever be here, talking to you,” she told him, but didn’t look down at her hand the way she normally did when she discussed it. Instead, she kept her eyes pinned to his face. “It saved me. I would’ve been lost forever, had I not been at the Conclave.”

“I didn’t know that,” he told her gently, placing a hand on her arm. “I didn’t know what it had done to you, or what it could do in your possession. Cassandra suspected duplicity. She threatened to have me executed as an apostate if I didn’t produce results.”

“Gods, really?” Asha looked at him, horrified. “...she wouldn’t have done it, though, would she? She probably was just scared she’d made the wrong choice, or just desperately wanted results, for Justinia’s sake. She’s distrustful of everyone, but she gave me a fair chance to prove myself.”

“Well, let’s just say my place here was more precarious then, before I had the Herald of Andraste on my side.”

“Please don’t call me that, you _know_ it isn’t true.”

“But you’re right, I don’t think the Seeker wouldn’t have made good on her threats. I never truly feared for my own life, but I didn’t feel I could trust her. Everything was so uncertain. You were never going to wake up - how could you, a mortal sent physically through the Fade? I was frustrated, frightened. The spirits I might have consulted had been driven away by the Breach. Although I wished to help, I had no faith or trust in Cassandra and her temper, or she in me and my theories… I was ready to flee.”

“You said that before - but where could you have gone?” Asha said, “we know how much more this is than just the Breach now. Rifts all over Thedas. You wouldn’t have been safe anywhere.”

Solas gave a small, self-deprecating smile, squeezing her arm before letting his hand drop again. “Yes, I planned to run far away and try to fix the Breach from a distance, but I was under no illusion of it being a good plan.”

“And here I thought you were the sensible one," Asha grinned, "I thought about running, in the beginning... I mean, you know that. I’ve told you that. But that first day, when I woke up after we’d first visited the temple. I imagined just… walking away. Into the forest, to the nearest clan I could find. I probably wouldn’t have gotten far, with the mark. Maybe Corypheus would’ve tracked me down earlier.”

“I told myself one more attempt to seal the rifts. I tried and failed. No ordinary magic would affect them. I watched the rift expand and grow, resigned myself to flee, and then…” he looked over at her, and it was like that first day when they stood side by side at the rift, almost vivid in her mind’s eye, “it seemed you were the key to our salvation.”

“Blessed to flail at rifts with some degree of skill,” she quoted at him, and this time she glanced down at her marked hand as she said it. Only… the anchor wasn’t there. Her palm wasn’t even scarred with the angry welts that the anomaly had left in those first few unstable days. Her skin was unblemished, bar the freckles that dusted over her knuckles.

“Regardless of how you underestimate your own talents, what I spent weeks trying and failing to fix, you sealed with a gesture… and right then I swore I felt the whole world change.”

Asha glanced up at Solas, watching her with an expression that was as solemn as usual, and yet somehow subtly different. She only realised how tense he constantly seemed when she saw him now, the taut lines of restraint in his shoulders and face mysteriously absent. He seemed more relaxed here, more open, like he wasn’t fighting to keep his emotions off his face. Although she couldn’t really name what emotion it exactly was that she saw now.

“...We’re in the Fade, aren’t we?” she said, carefully. She didn’t want to make a stupid guess, but it somehow felt right.

His expression shifted to something she could name, surprise, edged with delight. “How did you know?” he asked, genuinely interested.

“The anchor,” she said, raising her hand to show him, “it isn’t there. Probably because we’re not really here. Or maybe… is it because it’s a part of the Fade, so they sort of cancel each other out?” she bit her lip, “”I’m not sure.”

“An interesting question,” he said with another one of those pleased smiles, stepping forward and taking her hand in his, palm up. She didn’t shiver when he ran one thumb across the centre, tracing her lifeline, because godsdammit if this wasn’t real she wasn’t going to let herself feel it as if it _was_ real. “Perhaps you’ve projected yourself here in such a way that you imagine your ideal self. One before the anchor.”

“No, that’s not right,” she told him, quietly, looking at her hand encased in his. When he cast her a questioning glance, she winced as she admitted, “I think my tranquil brand is still here.”

“Ahh,” he said softly.

“But that doesn’t make sense either,” she said. “Why would I bring that with me? Surely it should stop me from existing here at all.”

“It may… it may also be a product of your imagination.”

“...l can’t imagine myself without it?” she made a disgusted sound, grimacing with shame.

“It’s a scar,” he told her gently. He still held her hand, and she couldn’t bring herself to tug her hand free. “Scars are a part of us, and they don’t make people weak. Perhaps your brand is not merely an echo of the prison that you once resided in, but also a reminder that you broke free.”

She looked up at him. If this had been the real world, she thought her eyes would’ve perhaps been blurred with tears at this point, but her vision remained crystal clear. “This… this is wonderful,” she whispered, looking out around at this empty version of Haven, preserved like a fly in amber, “when I - when I knew what was about to happen to me, in those last moments, I don’t think I could’ve ever imagined _this_. That I’d ever be able to come here again. That I’d be able to remember it. What is it about this place that makes it so integral to a mage’s very soul?”

“A question many have spent millennia trying to answer. Maybe you can ask me an easier one?”

She grinned, “always nice to know you don’t quite know _everything_.”

“There are many, many things I do not know, Asha,” Solas replied calmly. “Would that I had a lot more knowledge than I currently possess.” He dropped her hand, and Asha tried not to show how much she noticed the loss. 

“I’m sure there’s many, many spirits to ask, at least.”

“Not on everything, no.” He walked away a little, to stand on the very edge of the square, looking out over Haven.

“Solas?” she asked tentatively. He turned to look at her, “If we’re in the Fade… does it have to be Haven? Can you take me somewhere else?”

“Why? Where do you want to go?”

“I - it’s hard to describe, we don’t really have names-”

“You made the music earlier,” he told her, “maybe you can change things here.”

“Is it safe? I don’t even know how.”

“You’ll be safe, as long as you are with me. If you want to go somewhere in particular, please, try.”

“Ok…” she bit her lip, then closed her eyes. It felt weird, now that she knew she was dreaming, to close them, but it also seemed like the natural thing to do - most fancy magic things required it. So, tentatively, she began to imagine where she wanted to be: a camp, with bright painted aravals and sun dappled tents underneath a canopy of evergreen trees. The slight taste of salt on the breeze, like a ghost of sea spray, and a small strip of blue visible on the horizon to the east as cliffs dropped down towards the ocean.

She heard Solas’ breath catch, and suddenly her eyes weren’t closed. They were open, and she stood in Clan Lavellan’s summer camp, at the edge of the Waking Sea. 

“Oh.” she whispered. It was like a fresh wound opened in her chest, an unseen sword buried under her ribs and reaching all the way to her spine. Her heart hurt so sweetly to see her home recreated in such untouched perfection.

Solas was in the same position he’d been before, now standing on a patch of deadfall. He took a single step closer to her, then hesitated, clearly worried she didn’t want him to intrude. “Asha, are you-”

She strode forward and grabbed his hand before he could finish the sentence, interlinking their fingers to ground herself before grief set her adrift. “I will be,” she said, willing it fiercely to be true. She stood there a few heartbeats, breathing through the pain. She wouldn’t let this image shift or change, not when it was so solid in front of her. “Oh gods,” she breathed, “it’s… just like I remember it.”

“You grew up here,” he said quietly.

“We came here every summer,” she told him. She tugged on their woven hands, and started moving forward, through the gap between two aravals and into the open square surrounding the central campfire. He followed behind silently. Like Haven, it was empty, the fire pit extinguished. But the _colours_ \- the araval with orange sails belonged to Mahanon’s family, and the one with pink and gold threaded embroidery was Deshanna’s. The deep teal and turquoise… “I lived there,” she told him, pointing to it. “My sister and I, we dyed those sails. Some of my happiest memories are here.”

“Asha, I-”

“This wasn’t where it happened,” she interrupted him, weaving through the aravals to the place where the halla would’ve grazed, had they populated this facsimile of the camp. That was to the east, and so she led him further, towards the cliffs and the glimpse of the coastline below. Her eyes drank in the signs of life - the chopped down trees, the grazing land, the smudges of ash at the watch posts on the outskirts of the camp - like a starving man falling upon a feast. “The massacre - it happened in the the winter, we'd gotten back months before. That’s why it isn’t scary to see this place empty. Please don’t worry.”

Solas fell silent again and remained so as she walked them both up to the very edge of the cliffs. Below them was a small ribbon of beach, and then the Waking Sea. It faded to an incoherent smudge on the horizon - her mind couldn’t populate what had exactly been there, before. An imperfect replica, but still so much more than she could ever have imagined.

She took a long, full breath, tasting the sea breeze on her tongue. It was hard to breathe around the pain in her chest, and yet it also seemed like the first breath she’d taken fully since she’d woken up in Haven. Even though she wasn’t even awake.

“It’s beautiful,” Solas murmured.

“I know,” Asha glanced over and smiled at him, as her hair was buffeted by the breeze her memory conjured. “We - the Clan - have been coming here since even Deshanna was a girl. She loved it so much - she said the trees remembered us, because they only ever flowered after we arrived. Which was bullshit, obviously. But this is the place that feels most like home, to me.”

They stared silently at the horizon for a couple of seconds, hands still intertwined, before Solas spoke again. “Thank you for sharing it with me.”

“Solas!” she span to him, incredulous, “I - _thank you!_ You know how amazing this is, right? Another… another place I never thought I’d see again. And you’ve given it to me. You shared it with _me_. I hope you can realise how much this means to me, truly I do.”

They were standing close together, and his eyes roamed across her face, as if he was drinking her expression in with the same hunger with which she’d devoured the memories of her camp. A chunk of wild red hair flew into her face, driven by the wind she’d created and now couldn’t will away. He leaned in, and with his free hand brushed it away, tucking it carefully behind her ear. “I do not deserve your thanks, _lethallan_ ,” he told her, “but I am glad, at least, that I could give you this.”

“Solas, you speak of this as if it’s nothing,” she tugged on his hand, willing him to believe her, “this is possibly the _best_ gift I’ve ever been given.”

“The Fade could give you anything, powers you’ve never even dreamed of, and this is what you ask of it,” he didn’t seem capable of looking away from her, and even though Asha would normally have broken their eye contact by now out of awkwardness, she didn’t look away either. 

“Hey, don’t belittle my dreams!” she told him, “this was my first time! And I mean, what else would I even _want_?”

She stopped, sucking in a breath. That seemed like a dangerous question to ask, right this second.

Solas didn’t seem to notice, but he certainly did notice the way she tensed a little, as his hand by her ear moved to trace her cheek. “You are something truly special, Ashatarsylnin Lavellan.”

“I usually hate my full name,” she remarked, her brain not seemingly able to stay silent.

He quirked an eyebrow at her. She wondered if the ‘ideal self’ he projected into the Fade was exceptionally talented at making that particular look send a jolt of adrenaline through her projected stomach, “'Usually'?”

“Well,” she smiled at him, feeling slightly bashful, “not many people say it quite as prettily as you do.”

And - oh gods - he knew about that one time she’d used elven to spice up her sex life. _Fuck!_ she thought, hoping his memory wasn’t as keen as hers was in this particular moment. 

But what did it matter? This was it, right? After months of friendship, of feeling like he was the only person she fully trusted, and then weeks of dancing around each other in a flirtation she never quite felt like she had stable footing in, it was finally happening. They were stood together, bare inches apart, on the edge of the childhood home he’d given her the key to. Standing on the cliffs by the Waking Sea, the place that she’d visited with Mahanon, her first love, so very many times. And he was looking at her almost as if she truly _had_ changed the world, as if she was the centre of everything in the Fade and outside of it. She wasn’t imagining it, she _couldn’t_ be imagining it. This was _real_.

“You know we’re about to kiss, right?” she blurted, before her brain could catch up with her mouth and stop it from moving. “Because otherwise things are about to get truly embarrassing.”

He gave her a smile that was bemused and amused in equal measure, and it was one that she couldn’t doubt held some kind of _affection_ in it. He looked at her like he knew her, like he hadn’t expected her to say anything else less stupid or more subtle. And because she’d already ruined it with those stupid words, shattered the illusion of guarded aloofness and indifference, she simply thought ‘fuck it’. She stepped in, up onto her tiptoes, and smashed her lips to his.

It seemed like the version of her that occupied the Fade was far from her ‘ideal self’, because if that was had been the case then that first attempt at a kiss would’ve been far neater, and a fuck tonne sexier. Instead, it ended up being mostly a clash of teeth that transitioned with a degree of admirable skill into a press of lips . She tried to remember how one did this - it seemed the memory fled her every time - as she sealed his mouth with hers, gently sucking on his bottom lip.

A couple of seconds passed, and the hand on her cheek hadn’t moved, but neither did he seem to be responding. _Oh_. She broke away with fear in her gut, blinking up at him. He was wide-eyed and shocked. “Fuck,” she said regretfully, sure she must have miscalculated, and made to step back when suddenly the hand at her cheek moved to her hair and _tightened_. The hand she held with her own moved to her back with their fingers still entwined, and with that as his leverage she was abruptly pulled back towards him, with only just enough time to angle her mouth.

This kiss was confident, certain. Probably because he was the one leading it. Her hand was twisted gently behind her back in a way that didn’t hurt but gave him control, and he pressed her up against him, chest to chest, her neck arched back as he bent slightly over her, cradling the back of her skull. Her other hand clinged to his shoulder for balance, grabbing a handful of his shirt, and she let out a small gasp, eyes fluttering shut as she trusted him to hold her up. 

Mouth now open, the kiss deepened, and she untangled her fingers from his at her back just so that she could _hold_ onto something else, bringing her hand round to cup his cheek and keep him anchored close to her. He tugged her even closer, arms wrapping around her. Gods, his hand was so close to her tranquil brand, a thumb splayed so that it almost brushed the edge through her clothes, and she didn’t even _care_ , their breaths mingling as they broke apart and then came back together not a second later as if they couldn’t stand to be separated.

It was the kind of kiss that probably could have lasted hours, if Asha had had any say in the matter. As things stood, when it was cut off, she was incredulous at the suddenness of it. Her lips chased his unthinkingly into his space because she couldn’t comprehend the likelihood of it stopping. With a small, almost reluctant groan of surrender he was drawn back down to her for the space of another few breaths. He bit her lip and she made surprised, pleased sound, because he hadn't really struck her as the type. But then his hands moved to her shoulders and, rather than taking that as a signal to move closer, he pushed her back and away from him.

She was left stunned, blinking as he stepped away, chest heaving and eyes looking a little wild and panicked, like he too had miscalculated something. “We shouldn’t. Not even here.”

“Why _not_ here?” Asha asked him, and it was a genuine question, because her brain was still struggling to process that they were no longer kissing. “Here seems perfect - you _know_ we’ve been annoying Cassandra and Bull for days, and I really hate having an audience-”

“I shouldn’t have… I’m sorry…”

“Why are you _sorry_?”

“Please Asha,” he looked at the landscape around them, “this memory, it’s important to you. Please don’t let it get ruined, not by this.”

“Gods, it wasn’t that bad, was it?”

“I. No - I - I can’t. I’m sorry. You need to _wake up_.”

Asha took a breath to speak, but then her eyes snapped open, and she was laid flat on the boards of the elevated platform. Rain drummed loud on the tarp canopy they'd strung up in an effort to keep themselves dry, drowning out her incredulous gasp at being so unceremoniously flung out of the Fade. Over a _kiss_. Even one night stands tended to give you the dignity of a cup of coffee the morning after! She turned in her bedroll to see Solas laying ten feet away from her. Though he didn’t move, she _knew_ he must be awake as well. He didn't turn to look back at her. He didn't do anything.

She considered calling out to him, but Bull was on watch and would hear her. Having a conversation about what had just taken place in a shared dream would likely raise some eyebrows. So she turned away, pressed her lips together, and stewed in her confusion, before being dragged back under into a much more straightforward sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know you're living that #slowburn life when you find yourself wondering "is this kiss too rushed?" and then you look down at your wordcount and see you're almost at 150k. No brain, I think we're good. I think they're allowed to smush lips by now :')
> 
> I know I should be talking about ships or whatever in this author's note, but honestly? What the fuck is going on with the Fallow Mire???! This is the real question, guys. I dredged up a bunch of lore to see if anyone could give me a canon reason why there's a zombie level in this video game, but there literally isn't any. Asha and Solas' (sapiosexual as fuck) conversation about what might be causing the plague is taken from some Inquisition dialogue, the wiki page, and a bunch of reddit threads. I like the Fitfth Blight theory, myself.
> 
> Was this scene worth the 150k wait? Probably not. I'm enjoying myself though xD


	39. Chapter Thirty-Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha tries to sort out her personal life, and a Warden arrives in Skyhold.

The next morning they woke early and raided the Avvar stronghold, releasing the captive Inquisition soldiers. Asha didn’t yet have a hilt to enable her use of a spirit blade in combat, but as Solas checked over the survivors and they picked the ruin clean, Cassandra drilled her through the moves she’d performed to take on the Avvar warrior.

Then it was a straightforward escort back north with the freed prisoners, back to the Inquisition camp at the mouth of the Mire. They picked up the horses they’d had to leave on firmer ground, and then travelled onwards on the main road in the direction of Crestwood.

It was perfectly straightforward. Seamlessly simple. Everything was fine.

The whole day, Asha waited for Solas to come up to her. To _say something_. When they’d stood facing each other over the packed remnants of their camp, she thought the first spark of eye contact would give her some clue to his state of mind, but all that happened was that he looked away. During the mission, he lingered at the back of the group while she, as Inquisitor, was required to lead. She fell into a discussion over tactics with Cassandra, when what really plagued her mind was the kiss that had taken place the night before. 

Why wasn’t he talking to her? Yes, maybe a bog full of dead people was not the most romantic place to talk. But when night came at the edge of the Mire and he still didn't request a private conversation, she knew he must be avoiding her.

That night, she wondered if he would seek her out in the Fade again. But her dreams were plain, and forgetful. She was shaken awake to relieve Cassandra on watch duty, and her first reflexive thought was: _the bastard_.

But no. Maybe she was being unfair. She’d kissed him first. And maybe he’d taken what she’d said about not liking an audience to heart - maybe he was waiting for the right moment to broach the topic. She hadn’t tried to talk to him either, anxious and confused and a little hurt at how abruptly he’d pushed her out of the dream. And half-worried that it had just been a very lustful fantasy, although _of course_ she knew it had been real.

 _Maybe he just didn’t want to kiss me,_ she thought, as dawn began to leak across the horizon like a tipped inkwell. That kiss hadn’t felt particularly ‘unwilling’, but maybe he kissed everyone that well even when caught unawares. Had she misunderstood what it meant? 

The sinking feeling that settled in her stomach at that thought only got worse over the course of the next day. This time, he didn’t avoid her company, but everything he said was so fucking mundane, from the terrible weather that followed them out of the Mire, to his suggestions for optimal metals for a spirit blade hilt, to an imaginary chess game with Bull that was incredibly interesting but clearly a diversion from the fact that they weren’t really talking. And Asha stewed there just as silently, unable to do anything except respond in kind - polite, bland responses to his questions that sounded hollow to her ears. _Just talk to me,_ she willed silently, eyes pinned on the horizon ahead as she led Buttons forward, but they weren’t in the Fade, and things like that weren’t easy to say aloud.

By evening, she was _angry_. 

Yes, she’d kissed Solas. But he had no right reacting to it like this. The signals for her to do so had all come from him. _He’d_ approached _her_. He’d flirted with her for weeks. _He’d_ taken _her_ to the Fade. He’d given her access to a childhood memory that left her feeling raw, like she’d been flayed, and while that wasn’t exactly his fault he wasn’t just allowed to _do_ that - demonstrate such precious kindness that left her feeling vulnerable and then... just… _go_. Pull away. Kick her out. 

She felt… _abandoned_.

“I need to speak with you,” she said once they made camp, her voice clipped and struggling to hide her frustrated impatience. It was dark and cold, the incessant drizzle matching her mood perfectly.

Solas looked up at her, took one look at her face, and nodded. “Of course, Inquisitor,” he said, and he let her lead him away from camp silently, with no comments from Bull or Cassandra following in their wake. Asha kept her eyes ahead and her arms folded across her chest, hugging herself tightly as if that would stop the anxiety from churning her stomach to nausea.

When they’d reached what she felt was a safe distance from camp, she turned. “So…”

Looking at him, she could see his face was once more schooled to careful indifference, though she swore his eyes looked sorrowful. “So.”

“I’m sorry, but what the fuck is going on?” she demanded.

Solas cleared his throat awkwardly, “Inquisitor-”

“No!” she blushed at how it almost came out as a shout, and deliberately lowered her voice, “ _please_ stop calling me ‘Inquisitor’. You’ve never called me that! You can’t just… After what happened in the Fade… I -”

She was unable to finish her sentence. They both fell silent. Then, Solas moved to speak.

“Asha, I feel like I must apologise for my actions,” he told her, “the kiss was impulsive and ill-considered, and I should not have encouraged it.”

His words were abrupt and businesslike, like it was a foregone conclusion. “...Oh.” Asha said. Hurt blossomed in her chest, leaving her feeling defensive. She didn’t like hearing her actions described that way, like she was a child.

“I… I didn’t think it was ‘impulsive’. It seemed like there was a pretty strong rationale behind it, at the time.”

“I know that you were... grateful. But really I did nothing to conjure Clan Lavellan, that was entirely your own doing-”

“Please stop saying it like that. Like this is all me. It wasn’t even really about the camp, and you know it.” she hunched up defensively. His politeness left her feeling even more uncertain. He sounded like he was indulging a child’s fantasy - that the whole thing was just another one of her daydreams. “You kissed me too,” she continued plaintively, knowing it sounded petty, “Creators preserve me, you were the one who used tongue! It wasn’t one-sided, it hasn’t been for weeks.”

“Asha, please.”

“Please… what? Stop talking about it? Pretend that it didn’t happen? What do you even _want_ , Solas?”

She glared at him, and gods damn him, he avoided her gaze. “What happened… I know such things seem right, in the heat of the moment. But I’m not certain that it was the best idea,” he admitted. “It could complicate things for you, and lead to trouble.”

She couldn't help but note that he’d evaded her question. 

“I might be inclined to agree with you,” she replied, anger making her voice grow cold. “I was perfectly fine being your friend. How long has this ‘hot moment’ been going on, for you, exactly? You were the one who flirted with me and _kept_ flirting with me, the one who acted like there’s something more to all this. Why did you do it, if you’re not interested?”

He flinched, and she pressed the advantage, “you can’t just… change your mind and then act like it’s always been that way! It isn’t fair.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said quietly. “If - if I could take some time to think - there are considerations…”

“Oh, are there?” she demanded, “and what are they?”

At this, pain flickered across his face, and she hated to admit there was a little satisfaction in seeing it there - at knowing, at least, that he felt _something_. It offered confirmation that everything that had happened was not simply her imagination, Fade-tongue included.

“I… can’t say,” he said, finally. Seeing the look on her face, he even winced at his own wording.

“Ah. So, while I’m ‘impulsive’ and ‘ill-considered’ for trying to just put things out in the open, you’re allowed to toy with my feelings for _weeks_ and then suddenly baulk the moment I act on it? And that doesn’t strike you as… unfair? Cowardly?”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, an echo of the way he’d spoken as he pushed her from their shared dream.

Asha felt hurt and embarrassed. His predictions in the Fade had been right - now that it was unfurling into this mess, even the visit to the Clan Lavellan camp now felt somehow tainted. Gods, but she hadn’t shown anyone anything like that - that was a part of her very _soul_. And then he’d pushed her away from it, and from him.

And yet Asha knew that moment had been special. “I _know_ you care for me,” she said suddenly, certain that much, at least, was true.

Solas closed his eyes briefly, “I do.”

“But… you don’t want to-”

“- I don’t know.”

“Not exactly a ringing endorsement.” She herself could still remember his hand pressed against her back, burning through her clothes.

“...I’m sorry.”

“Is it… me? Was it bad?” the words flooded out before she could stop them, and she instantly regretted it.

“ _Asha_ ,” he said her name with a weight of feeling that slammed into her: sympathy, pity, affection...

This… _this_ was a feeling she had not missed. The disappointed hopes, the _doubt_. The questions that were already there, ringing in her skull, about what she could have possibly done differently to somehow change the course of events. Already cataloguing what she must’ve done wrong, what she might lack, why she wasn’t… good enough.

“Don’t answer that, that was a stupid question” she muttered, scrubbing a hand tiredly across her face and letting out a long, frustrated sigh. “Let’s not go into anything personal, seeing as you don’t seem up to that either. So: you regret what happened, and you didn’t mean to, and you don’t want it to happen again?”

“That’s... not quite what I meant.”

“So…” she narrowed her eyes, “you _don’t_ regret what happened, and you _did_ mean to, and it’s going to happen again?”

He seemed unable to respond to that, and simply gave her another pained look, one that she’d deliberately wanted to cause out of spite. 

“Didn’t think so,” she continued, fighting to keep the bitterness out of her voice. She paced a little further away from him, before turning, “Well, Solas, it was just a kiss. Not the end of the world. I guess we just... stop. Like I said, I’m happy with friendship, and I don’t appreciate people meddling with my feelings. You stop flirting, I won’t throw myself at you in an ‘ill-considered’ moment, and we go back to the way things were before. Do you have any problems with that?”

Solas swallowed, his throat bobbing nervously, and clasped his hands behind his back. He looked… well. Pleasingly chastened. At the very least he wasn’t indifferent - she thought that if he’d seemed unaffected, that would’ve been worse.

If she didn’t look at his face and immediately imagine kissing him again, she might even be able to kid herself that she had the upper-hand.

“No, I don’t,” he said finally, though his voice sounded a little hollow, “in fact, I think that may be… wise.”

 _Yes, that’s me. ‘Wise’, with my ‘indomitable focus’ on the task at hand._

“Ok then, so we’re agreed,” she said, even as the hurt continued bubbling in her chest, stoked by her now-wounded pride. It would’ve been nice for one kiss to be the convincing argument someone needed to fall head-over-heels in love with her, but it seemed that that wouldn’t be the case here. “The kiss was a mistake.”

Solas didn’t even have a response to that, though his eyes closed briefly again, like she’d wounded him. _Good_ , she found herself thinking. If he didn’t have the courage or capacity to take ownership of his actions, then he should have reason to think over them with maybe a little bit of regret.

“I’m heading back to camp,” she said. She turned away, took a few steps, and then turned back to him once she was certain she wasn't going to do anything stupid, like cry. “Rest assured, it won’t happen again. I’d appreciate it if you respect my boundaries, and treat me like a friend.”

“ _Lethallan._ ” When she’d made it a few feet, his quiet voice caused her to pause for a second, almost despite herself. “I am… not often thrown by things that happen to me in dreams.”

“Yes, well,” she snapped, angrily, not feeling generous enough to turn around, “maybe you shouldn’t go around kissing people in them, then. It may help you maintain your precious equilibrium.”

Dawn had not yet broken in Skyhold, and the entire castle was cloaked in a pale, periwinkle blue.

Cullen scrubbed his face tiredly, willing himself to wake up. It had been a late night - another pang of withdrawal symptoms leaving him restless. He hadn’t bothered putting on his armour, and strode across the walkway to the library in a plain shirt and breeches, bracing himself against the brief excursion into the chill. He hoped Josephine had managed to brew some coffee. It was hard to imagine the ambassador as anything other than pristinely presented and composed, even at this hour, so he guessed she might have organised something along those lines.

In his pocket was the note he’d received from one of Leliana’s runners, transcribed from her various reports in the recognisable hand of one of her scribes. A message from Cassandra, on behalf of the Inquisitor: _Rendezvous with Hawke’s Warden successful. Discretion required. We are bringing them with us to Skyhold under cover of darkness. Findings need to be discussed. Expect an hour before dawn._

As he walked through the silent castle, Cullen wondered what had been uncovered to need such an immediate - and clandestine, by their standards - meeting. He’d thought the revelations regarding Crestwood’s mayor and the closing of the underwater rift had been horrifying enough, and both Asha and Cassandra had deemed that perfectly acceptable to include in their correspondence. For them to both decide to keep this new intelligence secret until discussed in person... it didn’t bode well for the Wardens’ level of involvement in the conspiracy. 

When he reached the war room, he found both Leliana and Josephine already waiting there, looking about as tired as he felt. Leliana hadn’t bothered with armour either, wearing a plain shirt and breeches that he was almost surprised by, as he wasn’t used to seeing the Nightingale in anything that could be termed ‘casual wear’. As he’d predicted, the ambassador had not a hair out of place, and a full tea set was laid out on the side. 

“My scouts noticed the Inquisitor’s arrival roughly five minutes ago,” Leliana said as he poured himself a coffee and left it black. “She handed off her horses and then went in through one of the doors behind the stable. Hawke was with her, but no warden. The rest of the party have not been seen. She should be here momentarily.”

“Wonderful,” Cullen said, not really meaning it. When he found the coffee an acceptable temperature - he shouldn’t expect anything less than perfect hospitality from Josie, he supposed - he downed it in one go. He certainly needed it, if he was moments away from being in the same room as Sidonie Hawke. 

As Leliana predicted, there was a timid knock on the door a few minutes later as he was pouring that second coffee, and it creaked open to admit a bedraggled Asha Lavellan. “Morning,” she said. The tiredness in her voice made him instinctively hold out his mug towards her, even though he’d already drunk from it. She dismissed it with a wave of her hand.

Her clothing was rumpled, as if she’d peeled off her armour moments ago but not bothered changing, and her hair was scraped back in a braid that looked like it might be a couple of days - or at least a few sleeps - old. Immediately Cullen began looking for wounds, but couldn’t see any visible: he’d become too used to seeing the Inquisitor both tired and injured in tandem, it seemed. Sidonie followed in behind, in a much better condition with lipstick intact, as always. 

Cullen was surprised when Cassandra didn’t follow in afterwards - when Leliana had mentioned the rest of the party being absent, he hadn’t assumed that would include the Seeker.

“Cassandra is, um, with Hawke’s friend,” Asha told him, though he hadn’t said anything. She shifted nervously, “they’ll be up in a second, he just wasn’t… feeling great. About being here. And um… well, Sidonie wanted to test the waters a little.”

“Naturally, I am the very spirit of caution,” Sidonie drawled, her standard bravado firmly in place. Cullen thought that, despite her immaculately constructed front, she looked nervous and defensive. She levelled her eyes at each of the advisors in turn, nodding at Leliana, and staring at Cullen for a markedly longer time. He bore it without comment - they’d never exactly been on the best of terms. 

Asha fidgeted again, plucking at her shirt. “I’m sorry for calling you all here so early, I thought it best to, um… discuss this with you guys, personally, first. Because I, well, I certainly need some help with this one,” she said. “Not to be displaying the extent of my stunning leadership skills right from the off, or anything.”

“That’s what we’re here for, Inquisitor,” Leliana replied calmly. “To advise.”

“Well, um, first things first,” she said, gesturing to the Champion, “Sidonie would like an assurance that her informant is safe for however long he is Skyhold, while we verify his intelligence, and possibly going forward beyond that. I’ve agreed. If you’re not comfortable cooperating with him, I want him to at least be able to leave Skyhold safely, in exchange for trusting us enough to come here himself. He didn’t have to, so I want to respect that.”

“Why wouldn’t that be something we could guarantee?” Cullen asked warily. He didn’t know who Hawke’s contact might be, given that she was friends with many who’d taken the Grey.

“Why indeed?” Sidonie murmured with a taut smile.

“Um, well.” Asha squeaked, “he’s not… exactly…”

“If he’s some kind of criminal, it shouldn’t matter,” Leliana interrupted, “Grey Warden conscription places a person above the law.”

“I’d also like to take this moment to note that, should we ever make the decision to detain anyone, it would technically be considered a citizen arrest, at our current point of legitimacy,” Josephine chirped up, “it would be a voluntary act of service, at least on Fereldan soil. Meaning that we are not… well, _legally_ obliged to uphold any particular set of laws? Regardless of our perceived moral obligation?... I’m still verifying those particular parts of the treaty with Queen Anora, actually.”

“I don’t actually think he’s technically a criminal, in Ferelden?” Asha offered, weakly.

“Oh no, he absolutely is,” Sidonie corrected.

“Oh,” Asha said. “Wonderful.”

“You’re saying that you, as Inquisitor, have promised to let this person enter today under a kind of temporary truce?” Cullen clarified. When Asha nodded, he sighed, “then of course we’ll honour it. You’re our leader, and you wouldn’t make such a choice without reason.”

Asha let out a deep sigh, almost visibly deflating with relief. She turned to Sidonie, and gestured… well, towards Cullen specifically, which was a little bit disconcerting. “I told you. Is that reassuring enough?”

“You know,” mused Hawke, “it’s this kind of blind trust and loyalty that allowed Meredith to get away with literal bloody murder.”

Cullen bristled, but was surprised when Asha answered, in a tired and slightly angry voice, “yes, well, I’m not Meredith. No cursed lyrium swords for me.” 

Sid shrugged magnanimously. “I certainly won't complain when it works in my favour. And the current lack of weapons is a definite plus.”

“Ok, so,” Asha said, turning back to the group, as if those weren’t words that the Champion of Kirkwall had just uttered aloud. “Long story short: the Grey Wardens are kind of fucked. Apparently, all of them are hearing the Calling - or rather, the call of the archdemon, probably Corypheus’ pet archdemon. All at once.”

“Fuck,” muttered Leliana. Cullen met the spymaster's eyes, and knew they were both thinking of one Grey Warden in particular.

“Yeah,” Asha continued with a sigh, “but they don’t really know it’s Corypheus’ pet archdemon and they think it’s the real Calling so they’re all kind of… panicking. They think they’re all going to be wiped out in one fell swoop, leaving us unprotected from future Blights. And that means that they’ve-”

“- Done something _really fucking stupid_ ,” Sidonie said, while looking disdainfully down at her finger nails.

“- Decided to resort to blood magic,” Asha clarified, “allegedly.”

“One last blaze of glory down in the deep roads, demons versus darkspawn,” Sidonie added.

The thought made Cullen feel sick, “Maker’s breath.”

“We don’t really know for certain yet - this is just what Sidonie’s informant has uncovered through discussions with contacts in Weisshaupt,” Asha said. “He… well, he kind of knew about Corypheus, and how he manipulated the Wardens back in Kirkwall. That, along with the manufactured blanket Calling, made him think a little, and look into the matter further. And, well, he thinks that the Elder One is involved.”

“How is he resisting this Calling?” Leliana demanded, her voice a little hard. Asha looked at her, confused, and the spymaster actually… impossibly… clarified, in a short clipped sentence: “I have had word from Rose. Though far away, she is… hearing it too.”

“And Blackwall?” Asha asked.

Leliana shook her head, “I have not asked him about it.” she pursed her lips, “I thought doing so might trigger in him a desire to leave.”

“My pal’s not so much ‘resisting’ it,” said Sidonie, “as, well, not blindly following it to his death? Which is apparently the new warden way. He hears it, but he doesn’t fear it. He also doesn’t fancy the Deep Roads, which, honestly, fair enough.”

Cullen frowned, “but I thought that was expected of all Wardens, when the time came?”

Sidonie smiled sweetly at him, all teeth. “It is. He disagreed. Somewhat on principle.”

“Yeah, so, Sid’s informant isn’t… um… _technically_ a Warden?” Asha squeaked. “I mean, he’s a Warden, he’s done the Joining, so he hears the Calling-”

“- And has all the darkspawn tinglies,” Hawke added.

“- But… um… he’s not _with_ them anymore?”

“He’s broken faith with them?” Leliana asked, a frown beginning to form on her face. 

“It’s not unheard of,” Cullen pointed out, turning to Sidonie, “I mean, before he moved to Kirkwall, wasn’t your Anders originally part of the Ferelden Grey...”

He trailed off when it seemed that Asha couldn’t fight a wince at the mention of Anders’ name. Realisation dawned with all the finesse of a punch to the stomach. “Oh.”

Asha grimaced, looking very, very, apologetic, “...yeah.”

“Indeed,” Sidonie said, arms crossed over her chest, “ _my_ Anders was.”

“I guess that’s my entrance then?” came a weak, hoarse voice from the corridor outside. “I won’t lie, I was hoping for something a little more dramatic.”

The doors to the war room were pushed open to reveal Cassandra, with a face like thunder and her hand firmly steering a haggard man in dirty clothes, who wore his long, toffee-blonde hair in a very loose and mangled ponytail. As he was pushed forward, the man peaked up between the strands that had fallen into his eyes, to reveal a face with a scruffy beard and, strangely, a lattice-work scar like a lightning strike across his right cheek. It was the only thing that had changed since Cullen saw him last, two years ago, fighting for their lives against the red lyrium monster that had once been Meredith.

Anders - the Grey Warden, and the abomination at the heart of Kirkwall’s downfall - looked up at the five people stood in the war room, and gave a vague attempt at a smile. “Hello.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Anders has entered the Pro-Mage Chat. (￢‿￢)
> 
> Time for some more canon divergence, but there was absolutely no way I was going to pass up an opportunity to write my precious, wayward mage son. This version of Anders is, like this fic's version of Hawke, very different from what I actually perceive my 'canon' to be, but it's the Anders I need to fit my story so hopefully he doesn't feel OOC. I'll guess I'll find out tomorrow when you get to see a little more of him. 
> 
> This was a chonk of a chapter and very very serious - I hope everyone still enjoys it! This week's update (today's and tomorrow's) has ended up being pretty dense and plot heavy, so apologies in advance!! Hopefully you like intrigue. (And Anders!!)
> 
> And poor Asha. Why did her heart have to gravitate towards the one mage hobo who will only make her more sad??! (I said, like I haven't made this as an authorial choice.)


	40. Chapter Forty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A former tranquil and an abomination walk into the Inquisition...

Asha was having something of a shitty couple of weeks.

It was all very well and good, taking a no-nonsense approach to relationships and telling someone that you just wanted to be friends, but it was _fucking hard_ to employ in practice, while begging your heart and mind to comply. The night after she’d ended whatever it was that had started to happen with Solas, she had a dream which flung her inelegantly right back into Clan Lavellan’s camp, as it had been re-imagined in the Fade. The sunlight and colours had made her heart ache. She woke up with a start, tugged her bedroll up and over her head, and cried, as quietly as she could. The whole time, she desperately willed herself to stop - terrified that Solas would fucking _hear her_ , and know why she was sobbing under her covers.

But really, obtaining a slightly bruised heart and a similarly wounded ego was just the beginning of what proved to be a truly catastrophic ten days. She thought the road to Crestwood was painful - forcing a smile on her face as she ruthlessly kept up conversations with _all three_ members of her party - but her arrival there was worse. First, she’d pissed off a dragon on the outskirts of the village when fighting off some bandits too close to its stomping ground, and had to run away before she and Buttons ended up fried to a crisp. Then she’d done the small job of accidentally discovering a decade-old war crime, when all she’d wanted to do was close a fucking rift - which, oh yes, _turned out to be underwater_. 

And then. She’d. Well.

...Become the inadvertent protector and escort of a Rebel Mage extremist?

The note Isabela had snuck onto her person, asking her to leave Varric behind at Skyhold, had suddenly made total, brutal sense. For all his love of Sidonie Hawke and their time together in Kirkwall, right up to when they’d thrown down for the mages and protected the Circle from a templar onslaught, Varric had always been… circumspect, when discussing Anders. Asha gathered that he was not exactly the biggest fast. She was glad he’d left him behind. Just bringing Cassandra with her had proven to be a double-edged sword: the perfect guard for a confirmed abomination, though Asha hated to admit it, while also the person most horrified at the idea of transporting them back to Skyhold in the first place (with Bull, admittedly, a close second). 

“You cannot be serious!” the Seeker had hissed, incandescent with rage, when Asha had told her the agreement she'd reached with Sid, “ He’s a _murderer_. He caused all this! He was the reason for the Conclave in the first place!”

“He’s taking the opportunity to do the right thing and help, when he could simply flee and let the world all go to shit,” Asha replied, trying her best not to fear her friend even as instinctual terror crawled up her spine. “He’s our only lead on what has happened to the Grey Wardens, and the Elder One’s demon army!”

Cassandra paced, fury in every line of her body. “I cannot - This is - The Rebel Mages were an understandable decision, but this is madness, Asha! It spits in the face of the dead. The only reason he’s not enmeshed in the Wardens’ blood magic is because he’s _already an abomination_.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” was Solas’ own, unimpressed, contribution.

“Yes, it kind of is,” said Anders, weakly, from where he stood behind Hawke. “Which means I have a rather vested interest in _not_ being forced into doing something terrible by Corypheus?”

“You’ve already done something terrible!” Cass shrieked, spinning to look at Asha. “We should take him prisoner, try him for the crimes he’s committed.”

And then Sidonie had strode up between them, staring down her nose at the Seeker. “If you can’t guarantee Anders’ safety in this, we both walk,” the Champion of Kirkwall had growled - literally, growled. “You’re welcome to see if you can deal with the Elder One’s army on your own.”

Needless to say, the journey back had been… tense, and suddenly Solas was the last thing on her mind, except for checking in with him every ten minutes to ask: “do you think it’s a spirit of justice or vengeance, right now?”

Anders himself had been a nearly silent presence on their journey, a constant shadow at Sidonie’s right hand, never straying far from her side. They didn’t really talk together when in earshot of everyone else, but every so often one of them would touch the other’s shoulder, or share a small smile. Anders would snigger at the jokes Sid told the rest of the party at the worst possible moments, and every single time he looked startled by the sound. The two of them were the same age, but the mage looked almost ten years older, his hair and beard streaked through with grey. It attested to hardship which, considering you were using the _Champion of Kirkwall_ as the benchmark, spoke volumes.

On there way back through the Hinterlands - and hadn’t _that_ been fun, waiting for someone in the mage or templar factions still skirmishing to recognise their travelling companion - she took watch over the camp they’d erected in an empty cavern. She'd jumped out of her skin when he'd walked up behind her, unnoticed while she nervously gnawed at the nails on her anchored hand. While she wasn’t _scared_ of him, exactly, not the way Cass and Bull were, it was certainly unnerving to find him suddenly there.

He seemed to realise that, and offered her a small apologetic smile, before pointing at the anchor. “I wanted to ask you about that, before we got to this Skyhold of yours?”

“Oh? Sure,” she said, shifting over on her seat and offering up the place next to her. 

He hesitated for a second, then took a seat, peering down at her hand when she stretched it out between them. His eyes were bright, clearest grey, the colour of fresh ice, wrinkled with crow’s feet that spread out into the strange lightning burn mark that scarred most of his cheek. “This… are the rumours true? It stopped you from being tranquil?” he asked in a quiet, curious voice.

“Yes,” Asha replied, “we think it’s because it’s a part of the Fade itself. It forcibly reforged the connection my… my brand burnt away.”

“That’s...” he sighed, smoothed a hand across his beard, and gave an incredulous chuckle, “a motherfucking stroke of luck, to be honest.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You’re not going to try and say it’s the will of Andraste?”

“Don’t believe in Andraste, I’m afraid.” Asha shrugged, “I don’t need the Maker to still be thankful for a miracle.”

“I was… well, I was hoping for-”

She knew what he meant, even as he struggled to say it. “For something... easier to replicate?”

He cast a glance at her, startled that she’d understood. “I’ve lost a lot of good friends to tranquility, as well as some people I loved,” he admitted. “In a way, maybe it’s better that this was a complete fluke. I’d be kicking myself if there’d been a handy cure with us all along.”

 _And if there was, there’s no one left to use it on,_ Asha thought grimly. No reports of any tranquils yet to be found in Thedas, and instead Leliana’s scouts _kept_ finding oculara, out in the wilderness. She judiciously decided not to mention that to Anders, however. She wasn’t sure how the man or the spirit inside him would react to that particular development in the ‘tranquil solution’. 

“...A connection to the Fade…” Anders murmured, his eyes still on her hand. “Does that mean… with me and Justice…”

“I don’t know,” Asha replied. “You’d probably have to ask Solas - he understands those things way more than me. I don’t know if the brand would sever your connection to… him? Him. I think my Fade-ness is just too concentrated for the brand to fight off. It’s woven into me, now.”

Anders scratched his scarred cheek, gave a somewhat wry smile. “Yes, well. I know what that’s like.”

They sat in silence for a second, watching the breeze comb through the grass outside the cave entrance. 

“How did you get it?” Anders asked, suddenly. “Are the rumours true about that, too?”

“What, the anchor?”

“No. Um - the brand. Was more what I meant.” When Asha narrowed her eyes at him, Anders had the decency to look a little shame-faced. “You don’t have to answer that,” he said, “me and my big mouth.”

“No, I-” Asha bit her lip. “You’re not going to go all…” she mimed flashing eyes, and then a gruesome monstrous expression, not really sure what either Justice or Vengeance looked like and only going off what Varric’s stories conjured in her imagination, “on me - if I tell you?”

Anders actually gave her a crooked grin at that, before seemingly realising that it was probably inappropriate to do so. “No, I don’t think so. Justice is far quieter, these days. What we wanted to happen, well… it happened! Mages, out in the world. For better or worse. Now we’re both just... very tired.”

“Ok, then…” Asha said, “well. The rumours are probably true on that front. I’m the First of Clan Lavellan, I never lived in a Circle. The templars… came to me, as it were. In the Planasene forest. At least one of them from Kirkwall - probably all of them. It was just after the Rebellion. I think… they were scared? They thought I was a blood mage, anyway. It’s all a blur, I don’t know...”

She kept her eyes pinned on the horizon, but in her peripheral vision she saw him tense, his hands becoming white knuckled fists. She glanced at him, alarmed, looking for any sign of the spirit that Varric had described in his stories. Instead he just looked miserable, “I’m so sorry.”

Asha shifted uneasily in her seat, unsure what to do with that apology. “I don’t think it’s really your fault. The templars... the way Varric tells it, Meredith had that red lyrium sword for years."

“But even I can see, now, why I’m one of the reasons they hate us all so much...”

Asha sighed, “but… they hated us anyway.”

They lapsed into silence. “A mage inquisitor, though.” Anders said quietly, when some time had passed, “pretty impressive, to be honest. Meredith _would_ be rolling in her grave. If she wasn’t, you know, a statue.”

“I’d say it was intentional, but it really fucking wasn’t.” she muttered. “...If we’re asking intense personal questions, can I have a go?”

“Um… sure?”

She turned to Anders, and asked bluntly, “why a chantry? Why not the templar barracks, or the Circle itself?” 

Although the idea of discussing mass murder so casually made her feel a little sick, the question had been bugging her for days, ever since she’d met him.

Anders looked surprised by her question, then grimaced, looking away. He scrubbed a hand across his haggard face, looking once more like an old, old man. 

“I didn’t want to risk the lives of any mages in the blast,” he muttered, and the irony of that statement - at the wave of bloodshed that had followed his actions, Clan Lavellan and herself included, made Asha fiercely _hate him_ for a split second. 

And then the fury left her, and she pitied him in equal measure.

And now she stood in the war room, tired out of her mind, introducing him to her advisors, who all looked horrified by what she’d brought into their halls. The corpse of an ‘accidentally murdered’ templar - or whatever it was they suspected she might do in her worst moments - would probably have gone down better. Cullen seemed frozen to the spot, like she’d just stabbed someone in front of him and started summoning demons like butlers.

“ _This_ is your informant?” Leliana demanded of Sidonie, furiously.

“A Grey Warden whose absence from their ranks during this monumentally stupid, homicidal plan wouldn’t be noticed? Someone who’s fought Corypheus before and knows what his influence feels like?” Sid retorted, “yeah, maybe, just maybe, that’s my informant.”

“All of this leads back to him. The Conclave would never have been necessary, were it not for what happened in Kirkwall. We should kill him where he stands,” Leliana spat back. Even though she was dressed in plain clothes, two knives suddenly appeared in her hands.

“Ooooh,” said Anders nervously, backing up a step, as Asha stepped instinctively in front of him and threw a barrier up. She knew she should have kept her armour on. 

Sidonie took Anders’ other side, squaring up, though she didn't yet draw her sword. “Love it when a truce is shaky at best,” the Champion murmured.

“Hey!” Asha said, striving for severity, “can we all just calm down!”

“Um, forgive me,” Josie said timidly, raising her hand from where she stood looking rather nonplussed near her tea set, “but would that be… the apostate Anders, I presume?”

“The very same, I’m afraid,” Anders said tiredly. 

“And… Justice? Should I be addressing him as well?” the ambassador, ever one to strive for politeness, squeaked.

“He’s not… well, let’s just say he’s more… dormant, these days.”

Asha’s barrier dissipated, and the room fell into tense silence. No one immediately died, at least, although Leliana stood with her knives still raised. Cassandra stepped heavily forward, and placed a hand on Leliana’s shoulder. She’d had a few days to make peace with this new turn of events, although Asha could tell she was furious with her still, more furious than she had been even when she’d thought she’d been responsible for the Conclave. “I’m not happy about this either, Leliana,” she said in a grim tone, “but it is the Inquisitor’s decision, and we should honour it. It could be our only lead.”

“Look,” Asha said, “I’m just trying to stop the demon army we saw at Redcliffe. Anders is coming to us as a Grey Warden in this - well, sort of. Not a mage.”

“Do you know what this could do to the Inquisition’s reputation? You bought him into a stronghold already populated by Rebel Mages!”

“At night-time! As secretly as I could! You do realise we’re in a fortress right? That’s meant to be impenetrable and impossible to sneak into? Fuck, I half-thought you already knew… you know everything else!”

“This could count as an act of war,” the spymaster hissed.

“Well it’s not, is it?” Asha replied tiredly, “You could say all those same things about electing a former tranquil as your Inquisitor, and you still fucking did it. I know you’re both angry about what happened to Justinia, but Anders wasn’t responsible for that. The Elder One was. Anders didn’t organise the Conclave. And frankly, Kirkwall sounds like a shithole that was always going to fall, regardless of who kicked it off the cliff.”

“Hands off my charming city,” Sid said. Asha threw her a long-suffering look - it seemed that Hawke dealt with dangerous situations by making jokes at the most inappropriate moments.

“You really have no idea what this man did, Inquisitor,” Leliana told her coldly, “what working with him will mean.”

“Don't patronise me. Working with him will mean we deal with the Grey Warden problem now, not in a month or two months or whenever we get another agent not already corrupted by this fake Calling,” Asha said. "If we want to make it about Kirkwall - which we really, really shouldn't - then I know _exactly_ what Anders did. I was fucked over too, remember? The fallout from the Rebellion is the whole reason I’m even standing here. It’s affected me more than it has some of you.”

The room went quiet at that. Cullen, who’d been frozen the entire time, coughed, and said in a hoarse, choked voice. “She’s right. No one would make this decision... lightly.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” Anders muttered to Hawke, thankfully so that only Asha could hear. “He’s here?”

“Tell me about it,” Sidonie raised her voice and spoke to the room, “If your tranquil Inquisitor can work with templars and not throw a tantrum about it-”

“-I mean, I kind of did that -”

“- Or, frankly, murder them where they stand, I think you can keep your holy knickers from getting in a twist. Anders fought Corypheus with me once before - he’s the only Warden I know who can get close and still resist him when the time is right. We came here to help you, we can leave just as easily.”

“Can you?” the Nightingale asked in a sly whisper.

“Yes, they can,” Asha replied tersely. “And to be clear, that one _is_ an order.”

“Killing him will not bring any of them back,” Cassandra told the Nightingale, before narrowing her eyes at Anders, “perhaps it’s better that he simply be _useful_.”

“Exactly! Look, you had no problem using me when you’d thought I’d blown up the entire Conclave, because you needed the anchor. Now we need a Warden with inside knowledge, so just do the same thing here!” Asha said. “No offense, Anders.”

“None taken.” he replied weakly. “They sound like _lovely_ colleagues.”

“I’ve worked with worse,” Sid said, with a sidelong glance at her old friend.

“I… I don’t know what you hoped, but he can’t stay here, Inquisitor,” Cullen said. 

“Surprise, surprise...” Sid started.

“Oh, do be quiet, Champion.” Cullen snapped. Instinctively, Asha tensed, her usual reaction to templar anger, but she forced herself to relax as he continued, “your loyalty to your friends may mean you don’t give a damn about the consequences, but let’s put it in terms you understand: there’s simply no way we can keep his presence hidden long-term. He’s a highly powered abomination with multiple instances of lapsed control. If the spirit acts again, we can’t contain it. What’s more, beyond the templars and Andrastrians among our ranks, as many mages hate him as revere him. He’d be assassinated within the week, and everything he knows disappears with him. As much for his safety as everyone else’s, we need him _gone_.”

“Um, which brings us onto the next thing Anders was able to tell us,” Asha interrupted. She looked back and nudged him, thinking it was best for him to remind them all exactly how useful he was in the first place.

“You need people in the Western Approach,” the apostate said, “that’s where these demons are being raised - although I don’t know who’s raising them.”

“And Anders… has… _very kindly_ … volunteered to help with that! He and Sidonie will travel to the Western Approach and find the location for us, then I can meet up with them later,” Asha continued for him. She had a feeling the offer had been made out of self preservation rather than generosity. “I bought him here because I wanted to be upfront about where we’re getting all this from, and because I thought Leliana would want to hear his information on the Warden Calling firsthand given… well, I know you care about Rose. But he really doesn’t have to stay.” 

“And you wanted us complicit in harbouring him,” Leliana accused, glaring at her. “For if this all comes out. It looks bad for you, if you are alone in allying with mage extremists.”

Asha gaped at the Nightingale. “No, actually! I mean, yes, I want your ‘complicity’, because I thought it might be best for us, as an organisation, to reach a consensus on shit. But none of that other stuff crossed my mind - I’m… I’m not _you_! I simply thought that maybe good leadership starts with not keeping secrets from the people who are meant to be on your side! And that well… maybe we should give people a chance if they’re able and willing to help us against Corypheus.”

“Some people don’t deserve redemption,” Leliana hissed.

“Honestly? Not a good thesis to be throwing around, given the company present in this room!” Sidonie growled back.

“I _helped_ you with Meredith, Champion,” Cullen choked out. Asha cast an assessing glance over at him, figuring he and Cassandra were the main threats in the room. He’d turned ghostly pale, and she could see his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. _Thank fuck he didn’t bring a sword with him,_ she thought, no matter how much it was clearly distressing him. It was a stroke of luck - the man usually showed up to everything in armour.

“ _And so did Anders_ ,” Sid said, almost sweetly.

“Look, do we have a better plan? Do we have anyone else who can help?” Asha demanded. “Blackwall gave no indication this was happening, you’ve just said Rose Amell is nowhere near. So unless your pockets are full of Calling-resistant Warden allies you’ve been hiding from me, we just need to fucking deal, ok?”

“We’d be working with a murderer. A monster.”

“ _You work with murderers all the time!_ We have a _Benn Hassreth_ on our payroll! I’ve had to stop you from killing your own people! Mages don’t have a monopoly on shady shit!” Asha shrieked. She could see they were wary of her, all watching her movements with wide eyes, but her magic was completely under control. She was just fucking tired. She stopped, breathing heavily, and put her hands to her temples. “Look, I’m not asking you to endorse a second mage rebellion, I’m just asking if we can deploy an agent to do a fucking job. Just tell me, what do you care more about - one man, or a Grey Warden army composed entirely of blood mages and all their little demon pets?”

The room fell silent. Josephine shifted awkwardly from foot to foot while Cassandra looked grim and Leliana glared venomously at Asha while she stood in front of Anders like a shield. “The Western Approach is very far away,” the Ambassador offered weakly, “and… although I can’t really guarantee this off the top of my head, at this time in the morning… I believe it’s a territory that doesn’t share any extradition treaties with Kirkwall? Since… um, no one really lives there. Or wants to.”

“I’ve already made my peace,” Cass said shortly. “As long as he doesn’t stay here endangering my people, I don’t care how he serves us.”

“I’d love to see who exactly you let in, under Fiona’s banner,” Sidonie told her bitterly, “I bet half of them have more kills on their record than Anders does. Fuck, just ask your templar friends-”

“Sid,” Anders said, putting his hand on his friend’s shoulder, “ _stop_.”

“You’re… you’re right, Inquisitor,” Cullen said, “the demon army… is the priority. Our army is still small/ It would be better to stop them quickly before their numbers grow too big for us to have any hope of stopping. As long as he’s… not here. We should… we should be safe.”

“And what happens after?” Leliana asked, eyes directly on Asha, “if he helps us. You just… let him go? After all that he’s done.”

“Well,” Asha replied bluntly, “I was sort of under the impression that I’m the only one allowed to call trials, these days.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, this chapter is a little messy and not my best! I'm not entirely happy with how it currently stands. But instead of editing it for the fiftieth time, I'd rather move onto the funner content next week, so I've just decided to dump this and move on 😅
> 
> Although Awakening Anders is my favourite type of Anders (with his sense of humour, and his fun earring), I've decided to really lean into peak DA2 Sad Boi Anders™ for this fic. As far as I'm concerned, canon Anders Regrets!! Nothing!! about the chantry explosion, but I can definitely see this as another possible way his story could go. This seems fall more in line with how Varric describes him in Inquisition. If he was rivalled by Hawke and sees Justice as Vengeance, maybe? Anyway, it was super fun to write an Anders who's dealing with the consequences of his actions. Although I will forever mourn the loss of the disaster bi mage boi we see in Awakening :')
> 
> Unfortunately, even with this super-apologetic-version of his character, I just could not get over how much Cass and Leliana would blame him for inadvertently causing Justinia's death. And as for Cullen... well, how will he cope with being alone with an abomination, in a room, with no sword and no templar powers? I can't wait to find out!!
> 
> In next week's update, we have one of my favourite chapters of the entire fic so far!! Hopefully that will make up for this instalment. So I'll see you guys then xxx


	41. Chapter Forty-One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life resumes around Skyhold (this is basically a collection of drabbles, in a trenchcoat, pretending to be a chapter).

Hawke and Anders left before dawn the next day. They’d hidden them down in the Undercroft overnight, on Josephine’s suggestion, as the newly hired Arcanist hadn’t yet arrived from Orzammar and wouldn't do so until the end of the week.

“Well, that could’ve gone worse,” the mage said cheerfully, as he and Sidonie started shouldering their packs. “I really thought at least one templar would draw a sword on me.”

Sid snorted, "there's still time."

“I’m sorry that you can’t stay with us,” Asha said, and found herself meaning it. She knew, objectively, that Anders was a murderer. But looking at him now, haggard and tired and risking his life for people who’d been repeatedly cruel to him, out of loyalty to Hawke and guilt for a mistake he’d made years ago… she mostly just wanted to bundle him in a blanket and give him a nice warm meal.

“I’m rather afraid I cannot say the same,” he replied, flashing her his crooked grin.

“Fair. Andrastrians are a pain to be around.”

“I admire what you’re doing here,” he told her, as Sidonie turned to leave. “Not exactly my choice of people to bed down with, but your actions give mages legitimacy. You're proof that we can be trusted with power.”

“Honestly,” Asha raised her hand and waggled the anchor, “as long as this is here, I really don’t have much of a choice in the matter."

Anders sighed, giving her a long, hard look, “there’s always a choice. Even when we kid ourselves there isn’t. But you seem to be making the right one. You could do something brilliant here.”

“I’m not really… trying to? Honestly, I mostly just want to live to see the other side.”

“That’s a good baseline.” Anders winked, “but you might still overshoot yourself. Maybe do something _really_ drastic.”

“Spoken with all the fucking tact of someone who blew up a chantry,” grunted Sidonie. She cast an unimpressed glance at her friend, “c’mon Mage Rights, let’s get out of here before your lectures end up with one or both of us in the dungeons.”

Asha went straight from seeing them off to sparring with Cassandra. It… did not go well.

Upon their arrival in the training ground, it was palpably obvious that they were both there out of duty. Calling off practice would be admitting they were in disagreement. But they were also both tired, and Cassandra was angry. Oh, she might not be angry at _Asha_ , exactly (although, honestly, she probably was). But she was angry at the situation and her own powerlessness to stop it, and probably smarting over the loss of Justinia all over again. 

Asha understood all that.

But at the end of the day, Cassandra was angry, and angry Cassandra hit much harder with practice weapons than she needed to. It was around the fifth time Asha fell on her ass with more force than usual that she shouted, “hey!” 

Cassandra’s face was unreadable. “We are supposed to be fighting, Inquisitor.”

“No, we’re _supposed_ to be practicing fighting, and stop calling me ‘Inquisitor’ just because you’re angry with me,” Asha said grumpily, brushing herself down and resuming her stance with her quarterstaff. “What the fuck was I supposed to do? We need to stop that army.”

Cassandra didn’t say anything, waiting for Asha to place her feet. And then she came in with an unyielding flurry of blows that Asha somehow managed to deflect, though it forced her back several steps almost immediately. Pissed off that her friend was using her actions rather than her words, Asha paid back in kind, spinning her staff in the wide arc and whacking her three times. The first two hit her shield and Cassandra dodged the third. Asha stumbled forward into the empty space she left with a snarl of frustration.

“That man is a murderer,” the Seeker grunted. “We are fools if we trust him.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you.”

“We should’ve taken him into custody.”

“And done what?”

“Done... _something_. This is all because of him.”

“Yeah, and you know what I think?” Asha muttered, meeting a sword blow with the centre of her staff. She tried to throw the Seeker back, but that was an exercise in futility, because Cass was so fucking strong. “Meredith was _possessed_. It was _her_ who triggered the Rite of Annulment. Kirkwall would still have fallen, the mages would’ve gotten sick of being treated like shit, the Conclave would have still happened, and Corypheus would still try to take over Thedas. Look,” She grunted, still unable to push the Seeker off of her. “Anders didn’t kill Justinia.”

At the mention of the Divine’s name, Cassandra disengaged with a growl and then charged, her shield crashing into Asha’s shoulder with way too much force. “HEY!” Asha said angrily, and unthinkingly threw up a barrier, if only to stay standing while the impact was muffled.

She tried to angle her staff down at Cassandra’s feet to trip her up, but she was in too close. So instead, Asha kicked at them, viciously, and the Seeker’s momentum meant she tumbled forward over her opponent's hip. Of course, rather than falling inelegantly to the ground like Asha would, the Seeker executed a roll, and flowed up to standing with a stormy expression.

Not a templar move, but Asha didn’t dare point that out.

“You speak of things that you do not understand.” Cassandra ground out, and darted forward. Asha raised her staff defensively, as a series of bone jarring blows rained down on her. She pushed back against the last one, and Cassandra canted off slightly to the right. 

“Well, you know what? So do you!” She said through gritted teeth, and angled her staff butt to hit the centre of the Seeker’s chest. “The templars ruined my life, Cass, and I didn’t even _live_ in Kirkwall! Gods know what would’ve happened to me if I had.”

“Are you saying you… _approve_ of his actions?”

“Of course not! I just maybe ‘understand’ them a little more than you do. Are we supposed to feel _sorry_ that the Circles collapsed?”

With a cry, Cassandra tackled her, lifted her up around the waist, and dumped her on the ground. Asha landed on her back with a small surprised yelp, winded. She blinked up at the sky, and then at the Seeker, who seemed as surprised as she did that it had even happened. 

That one, well, it felt a little personal.

“Cassandra,” came a sharp voice from outside of Asha’s field of vision, as Cass began to scramble back off of her. Cullen approached from where he’d been stood talking to his underlings, crossing over into the sparring ground and coming to stand next to them both. “Leliana needs to speak with you, urgently. It can’t wait.”

“I… certainly,” Cassandra seemed to be grateful to have the excuse to get away. When she offered her hand to Asha to help her up, Asha hesitated a second before finally taking it. “My apologies, Inquisitor, we shall have to cut this short.”

“I can practice alone,” Asha said shortly, folding her arms protectively over her chest. Cassandra cast her a guilty look, before hurriedly leaving the training yard.

“Are… are you alright?” Cullen asked her, carefully, as Asha tried to catch her breath and began to take stock of her bruises. “Cassandra… it’s not you, you realise? Or even… well… _him_. She… she misses Divine Justinia a lot. The grief is still very fresh. She often worries that she failed her.”

“Yeah well, that’s not Anders’ problem and it’s not mine either.” Asha muttered, before glaring over at him, “have you come here to be angry at me too?”

“I - no, actually. I simply thought it might be best to give both you and Cassandra some space from each other. If only so you didn’t announce to the whole castle who exactly it is we’re working with.”

“Oh,” Asha said, surprised, “sorry. I did that thing again where I assume the worst of you. Are you saying that Leliana doesn’t need to see her?”

“No, she doesn’t, particularly,” the Commander admitted, scratching the back of his neck, “though the Nightingale might be a better person for Cassandra to vent her frustration at, rather than you.”

“That’s-” Asha halted. “Thank you.”

Cullen gave her a slightly surprised smile, like politeness wasn’t really something he expected from her. “You’re welcome.”

“It’s just… you seemed… in the war room...” Asha trailed off. What she really wanted to say was: _but Sidonie makes it sound like you hated all of the mages in Kirkwall_.

“I’m not… pleased,” he said, shortly, “a dangerous abomination… I don’t think it’s a risk that I -” he stopped, ran a hand through his hair with a tired sigh, “that _we’re_ prepared for. But it’s done now, and I don’t think shouting about it in the middle of Skyhold is going to put any of us in a better position.”

“I really didn’t know who I was meeting,” Asha admitted suddenly. “Hawke - she didn’t give anything away until we were there.”

“Yes, that’s rather Sidonie’s way,” Cullen replied.

“I think it’ll still work out?”

“I guess we’ll find out, one way or another.”

Asha bit her lip, looking down at where her staff trailed on the dirt. It wasn’t a resounding endorsement, though she hadn’t really expected one. Even she had mixed feelings - she thought she trusted Anders to help them, and knew Hawke was there to help _him_. But she also knew how easy it was to lose control when anger and feelings of injustice took over... and she didn’t have a murderous spirit dwelling within her that was highly concerned with both those things.

She jumped when the Commander spoke again, startling her from her thoughts, “the other risks you took paid off, Inquisitor, and they all came from trusting mages to act in the interest of the many. I’ve learnt not to trust my judgement, around you.”

“Mages don’t exactly want the world to end, you know. We live here too.”

“That’s not what I…” he sighed, “when an animal is cornered, it usually lashes out. Wildly. People will condemn the action, call the animal dangerous, even if they only do it to survive. They often simply meet violence with more violence. It takes a very trusting, but also careful, hand to offer a cornered animal kindness instead.”

She sort of understood what he was saying, but... “Are you comparing mages to animals?”

“Maker’s breath, I’m shit at this,” he muttered, and Asha let out a small giggle that she quickly smothered. Hearing Cullen Rutherford swear had the same surreal quality of hearing your grandmother do the same. “Just... mages have never gotten the chance to help us, because we automatically assume they won’t. And frankly, why would they? We’ve given them no reason to. You’re changing that. I don’t like the idea of working with Anders, but I’ll trust you. I’d be foolish not to, at this point.”

_It’s this kind of blind trust and loyalty in the chain of command that allowed Meredith to get away literal bloody murder._

“Thank you,” Asha said, again, pushing Sid’s commentary to the back of her mind. She’d earned this trust through risking her life several times over - it was a completely different situation from whatever might have happened in Kirkwall. 

And then, not because she really meant it, but because she thought it would be a nice thing to say, “I don’t think you’re shit at this at all.”

Cullen gave her a wry smile - clearly, her voice had been less than convincing. “Ever the vote of confidence, Inquisitor.”

They lapsed into awkward silence after that, their conversation tapering off. Asha could feel the sweat of her workout beginning to cool and chill her skin, and fought a shiver.

“I - do you need- that is-” Cullen sighed, and restarted, “you were sparring with Cassandra before I cut your session short. Do you need another partner?”

Asha’s eyes widened. “Why? Are you… volunteering?” she knew her voice sounded wary.

“I mean…” he rubbed the back of his neck, opened his mouth, seemingly thought better about it, then said, “I merely meant I could offer up one of my instructors, if you still wanted to continue your practice.”

“Oh,” she considered it for all of one second, then shook her head, “no, thanks. I’m good. Part of the reason I work with Cass is because I trust her - even when she dumps me on my ass for no reason.”

“I see.”

“Maybe when I’m better,” she didn’t say better at what exactly - better at being around templars? Better at not falling on her ass? Better at trusting herself not to panic or lash out at a moment’s notice? 

“Honestly, I think you’re investing in a steep learning curve, with only Seeker Pentaghast as an opponent. You’ll be unstoppable once you’re up against a normal soldier.”

She grinned up at him, “maybe that’s the plan.”

Cullen gave a tentative, hesitant smile back. The furrows that nestled near constantly between his brows smoothed out for a second, making him look almost boyish.

 _Gods, but he is handsome._ The thought came unbidden into her head.

It was a shame he was a templar.

Asha looked down at the roll of blue fabric laid spread across the floor of the empty bunkroom. Most of these temporary quarters had emptied as people found their place in Skyhold, or were deployed on missions. Now she only shared with four other people, who all watched her wide-eyed and slightly reverently, and who’s conversation mostly dropped to a hush whenever she was present. She didn’t know how these people, who’d glimpsed her moments after waking up and seen quite how non-functional she could be, could still hold her in such high regard. 

At one point, she’d received a new roommate - a young human girl who was training to be a soldier. At the sight of her, the girl had dropped to her knees and started babbling about ‘Andraste’ and ‘blessings’, while Asha said “oh, fuck, no, please stop-" because at the time she’d been getting dressed, and had her breeches tangled around her ankles.

She glared at the bundle of cloth. She didn’t want to make a dress out of it anymore.

“Stupid fucking Fade dreams,” Asha muttered, wielding the dress scissors she’d stolen from Vivienne’s tailor like a weapon. Well, she’d commissioned Sera to steal them - mostly to keep her entertained. She needed to take her friend on another mission, and soon - jars of bees were all well and good in theory, but she’d become concerned by the sheer number of them currently stacked up in Sera’s room.

If she made this fabric into a dress, would she even be able to wear it? On the one hand, it would be a harmless act of petty one-upmanship, looking fucking gorgeous and utterly unconcerned in the outfit she’d worn when Solas kissed her. But maybe it wouldn’t even affect him. What if he didn’t care?

Of course, if she didn’t make a dress now, and turned it into shirts (which was the only other thing she really needed, the way she kept sending herself into bogs) he would immediately know the reason. _The stupidly perceptive, smug bastard._ Why did it even matter what he thought of her anyway? She should just be making herself an incredibly beautiful dress all for her own enjoyment.

A quiet knock at her door startled her out of her staring competition with the puddle of fabric. She opened it to find Josephine on the other side, with a little relief. Their war room meeting earlier in the day had been a lukewarm affair, with both Leliana and Cassandra quiet and taciturn while Cullen sheltered in business-like decorum, and they all studiously avoided discussing progress in the Western Approach. But Josie had reliably opted to treat Asha like she always did, with politeness, small smiles, and gentle deference. Whatever thoughts she had about how they were now colluding with a known apostate terrorist, she’d kept them well hidden, and Asha didn’t want to press too hard in case she discovered it was all just an elaborate front.

“Asha, wonderful,” the ambassador said, “are you free? I was hoping I could show you something.”

“Yeah, sure. What’s up?”

“I, well...” Josie dimpled, “it is something of a surprise. I think it will be better to explain when we get there.”

“Do you want me to... close my eyes or anything?”

“Ooooh!” the ambassador looked excited by the prospect, “yes, you should, but not yet! We have a few flights of stairs first. Please don’t trip.”

As she led her through the castle, Josie kept up a steady stream of gossip regarding the nobles she’d interacted with in the past weeks. Apparently, the Prince of Starkhaven had sent the Inquisition a complimentary letter following the latest round of Herald rumours that had come out of the Destruction of Haven. It made Asha smile to imagine Ellana cooing over the penmanship of Sebastian Vael, even when she wouldn’t be able to read the letter's contents. 

When they reached what Varric was, to Asha’s dismay, calling the throne room, Josie said, “ok, time to close your eyes now!” 

Asha complied. The ambassador took her by the hand (and yes, Asha was still not completely immune to Josephine’s charms, and noted how wonderfully soft her noblewoman’s hands were) and led her blindly through a door. Asha couldn’t tell what direction they were walking in, though the ambassador did warn her when they approached another set of stairs.

A few turns, and then another door swung open, and the ambassador walked her through. She came to stand behind Asha and positioned her so she was facing the right direction. “Now… open them!”

Asha did so, and was presented with a massive room, with a lavish bed bigger than anything she’d ever slept in: almost three times the width of the bunk in her araval, or any bed in Haven. What made her gasp were the massive floor to ceiling windows that dominated one wall, looking out onto a balcony and the mountainside beyond. The entire room was flooded with buttery warm light.

“We’ve been discussing how we present ourselves to other dignitaries and powers, now that we have an extensive holding right here on the border,” Josephine said, as Asha took in the scene in front of her. “It was agreed that, as Inquisitor, you need official quarters. While you might like the bunkrooms, it does not do us credit to have you receive visitors in dormitories. I looked around the available rooms in Skyhold, and this seemed like the best fit. I know you’ve previously liked having people to share with, but now we are all under one roof hopefully you can treat us all like housemates…”

“Josephine, it’s lovely, I -” Asha turned to speak to the ambassador behind her, and then stopped, letting out a choked sound.

All that was behind Josephine were the stairs leading back down, and a large expanse of exposed stone wall. It was completely bare, except for a large, old looking banner that had been hung up in the centre, opposite the bed. The tapestry was old though freshly cleaned, fraying at one edge. In its centre was a large white stag with massive, branching horns that far extended above its head, against a deep emerald backdrop. A pattern of branches in the background were picked out in leaf green thread, as were the stag’s eyes.

“Ahh, yes,” Josie positively beamed, “I was doing some research on the background of everyone in the Inquisition - to see who we might best leverage in negotiations - and I found a census performed by a noble house in Wintervale from ninety years ago. The lady of the house was a historian who made extensive records of the Dalish who passed through her holdings in her lifetime. She’d apparently met with members of each to agree upon and devise Clan sigils. This was what she drew for Clan Lavellan - I saw the image replicated several times over in iconography also in Dalish histories, so I contacted the Orlesian College of Arms to see if they had a sigil amongst their heraldry records. They found this and shipped it to us, once I knew it was accurate and not just some noblewoman’s fancy! I even double checked it with Solas - I know he isn’t Dalish, you understand, but his knowledge of elven history is rather extensive…”

“I… yes,” Asha said, her throat thick with tears at the sight of Clan Lavellan’s banner on the wall of what was now her room, “yes, it’s accurate. Those banners, we all had them.” Her parents had stitched theirs into the centre of one of their aravel’s sails. She wondered if Solas had judged the accuracy from what she’d shown him in the Fade.

“Ahh, perfect! Thank goodness,” Josie grinned, “you see, I may have had banners mocked up for the whole of Skyhold, and while we haven’t started producing them yet, I do so love the designer. I would hate to have to lose such a pleasant business relationship.”

“You… you want to put Clan Lavellan’s banners up across Skyhold?”

“Only with your permission, of course,” Josephine told her, looking up at the tapestry, “they’d be slightly different from this one of course, as we are ourselves not members of the clan. White is the colour of remembrance, amongst the Dalish, yes?”

“Yes, yes it is,” Asha murmured. _Please don’t cry, please don’t cry, please don’t cry._

She burst into tears.

“Oh, no!” Josie was suddenly at her side, fumbling in her pockets for a monogrammed handkerchief with a lace trim. “Do you not like it? I was worried that it might be too much of a reminder of what’s happened in your past, but I also thought we should make sure people remember that you were the leader of your clan first, before you were ever the Inquisitor or Herald of Andraste -”

“No, Josie, it’s perfect,” Asha said, sniffling through snotty tears. “This is… this is so nice. I never thought -”

“I just wanted to make sure you feel at home here, Asha,” Josie told her gently, patting her shoulder as she cried, “I consulted the others, and we came up with this as a solution.”

“I love it,” Asha said, sincerely.

Asha transferred the scant amount of belongings she had from her bunkroom to her quarters - it was depressing how, given the destruction of Haven, she still had a grand total of four shirts and two pairs of pants to her name. When Sera called on her the next morning and saw exactly how wide the bed was, she waggled her eyebrows suggestively. Yes, Asha supposed, it was not really a bed designed to be slept in alone.

The room was huge in a way Asha wasn’t used to, and practically silent because it had only windows that faced outwards onto the Frostbacks. A couple of times in her first week, she woke up in the dead of night, utterly confused at the absence of other people’s breathing. But… the weather was warming up and it was nice to no longer constantly cover up her tranquil brand as she slept. Privacy had its benefits.

With them all waiting on news from the Western Approach, things gradually got back to normal. The next morning when Asha met Cass for her strength training, the Seeker was nowhere near as hostile, and even pulled her punches until Asha pointed out what she was doing. Cullen had been right: whatever she had spoken of with Leliana had helped her make peace with Asha’s decision, even if she obviously didn’t approve of it. 

Asha only hoped they hadn’t… started making plans for a leadership coup. You could never really tell, with Leliana.

It was only on her third day in her new rooms that she realised the massive dresser, that she thought had been rather _optimistically_ placed in her quarters, was actually full to the brim with clothes. It turned out that this had been Vivienne and Dorian’s contribution to the Inquisitor’s new rooms while she was away. Asha didn’t quite like to think about how either of them had guessed her measurements with such unerring accuracy. 

“Praise the Maker. You would’ve kept walking around looking like a hedgewitch fresh from her swamp, if we’d left it up to you,” Dorian commented, when she turned up to her Common lesson in a dark purple tunic and new faun coloured trousers. She stuffed the pile of blue fabric in a clump under her new massive bed, glad to have an excuse to ignore it. 

Out of stubborness, she continued to do her homework for her lessons opposite Solas at his desk, if only to demonstrate, _with alacrity_ , how little it affected her to be around him. The decision did wonders for her productivity. She spent so much time pointedly ignoring him that she actually breezed through her exercises with surprising efficiency. She started doing extra practice for her own peace of mind, crafting sentences with the words she’d learnt in her shaky, unsophisticated hand. Each time she finished she would then calmly, indifferently, slide the piece of paper across the desk towards him, and ask him to check it for errors - a request with which he always complied, equally bland faced and neutral.

These foolish exercises in self-torture meant there was absolutely no way she could ever let herself resume meditating with him. But without someone holding her accountable, her ‘meditation’ was a farce. Worries about Solas, worries about Anders, the deep conviction that all her advisors (except Josephine) secretly hated her… so many trivial things were piling up that she couldn’t get past all that detritus and actually dive into the stuff she was trying to unpick. By the end of one week of ineffectual meditation, she was rapidly becoming disappointed with herself. She could practically hear Deshanna’s imagined reprimands ringing in her head.

So… she went to Cole.

“You’re the perfect solution to my problem!” she told him excitedly, on the roof of the tower where she meditated and practiced magecraft. She’d found that thinking ‘Cole’ repeatedly was one of the best ways to draw him to her, when she wasn’t accidentally stumbling upon him in the courtyard, the healers’ tents, or the tavern. “I’m trying to get a handle on my emotions, but whenever I meditate it just makes everything more overwhelming. I’m scared I’ll hurt people. But if you’re here with me, you’ll be able to sense if I ever get out of control!”

“Do emotions have a handle?” Cole mumbled, his eyes trained awkwardly on the ground.

“You only have to watch me if you want to, of course. It might not be the most exciting thing.”

“I want to help.”

“Well, this would definitely help! You wouldn’t even have to be with me, you could just keep an…” ear? Eye? How did a spirit sense emotions exactly? “You could just keep tabs on how I’m doing every morning, and if it seems like I’m getting bad, you can go ask someone for help.”

“You don’t like falling.”

“...No. No, Cole, I don't.”

“But sometimes you have to fall, in order to be free. To escape.”

“I suppose so, yes.”

The boy titled his head to the side, examining her with his owlish expression, and then said finally, “like when you fell down that hole in Haven, and it meant you didn’t die.”

It was said with such innocent straight-forwardness that Asha couldn’t help but let out a small snigger, that seemed to confuse him a little. “Yes, Cole,” she said finally, “exactly like that.”

From that moment onwards, although she never saw him arrive during her magic practice, she would open her eyes after she finished her attempted meditation to find him sat up on the battlements, legs dangling over the edge while he examined and cleaned his daggers. 

“It makes you feel safe if you see me,” he said quietly, when she asked if he stayed there the whole time, and then he smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm super super busy tomorrow, so here's a chapter a day early! The next one will go up on Sunday, like usual.
> 
> No notes, really, for this chapter. Did I make the decision of which banners to put up in Skyhold a plot point in my fic? ...Maybe so.
> 
> Also, if you think my Cullen's being a bit too lenient in his views, blame the fact that romancing him has no basis in approval choices :') That's part of the reason why Cassandra comes across as the resident Andrastian hardass and Chantry apologist in my writing. Three years later and I've still never forgiven that time she punched me, rather than talk to me about fanfiction.


	42. Chapter Forty-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha learns some things about lyrium.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: addiction

When Asha came down into the courtyard, seeking out Cassandra for her practice, she found their usual sparring ground empty. It was surprising - Cass was one of those people who was nearly always early. After standing around for a couple of minutes, she went over to the armoury, wondering if - for once - she was not the person who would be attending their training hungover.

As she cracked the door open, she overheard Cass’ voice in the rafters above. “I understand your qualms, but he lived surrounded by templars and none of them could stop him,” she said. “I do not think changing course now will help anyone. It will only undo your hard work so far.”

Confused, Asha started up the steps, then stalled when she suddenly heard Cullen’s voice respond. “But we’d be safe in the knowledge that I might at least make an attempt, should things go wrong. Right now I’m… useless. I don’t even know if the Silence would answer, if I tried to call it.”

“You are far from useless,” the Seeker said, frustration lacing her voice. “And you know as well as I that a templar does not lose their abilities without lyrium.” 

“Though they might as well have,” came Cullen’s bitter murmur.

“Tell that to Warden Commander Theirin,” Cass pointed out.

“Ah yes, well, I suppose I can just join the Wardens, and trade one leash for another, one more means of falling under the thrall of a mind-controlling magister -”

At that point, Asha had begun to class what she was doing as eavesdropping, and it felt uncomfortable to continue. She took the next few stairs with deliberately, stomping footsteps, and let out a long sigh that sounded only a little theatrical. Cullen and Cassandra fell silent, and were both watching for her approach by the time she reached the first floor. Cass looked unconcerned, but Cullen’s expression fell when he realised it was her. 

“Hi!” she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound falsely bright. She failed. “Cass, I was - I’m just here for practice?

“My apologies, Inquisitor, the delay is my fault,” Cullen said. 

_Oh great, I’m the ‘Inquisitor’ again._ Whenever anything was wrong, it seemed like Cullen resorted to formality. “That’s not a problem, I can wait!” she replied, sounding bland to her own ears, “I’ll just…” she pointed down the stairs she’d just walked up, “go…”

“No, please, I’ve taken too much of Cassandra’s time already…”

“But if it’s urgent-”

Cassandra let out a disgusted groan at them both. “The Commander was speaking to me about personal matters, and I’ve made my opinion clear.” She looked over at her friend, “if your worries persist, we can revisit this at a later date.”

“I really don’t mind waiting...?” Asha offered weakly.

“Come with me, Inquisitor,” the Seeker said, with a roll of her eyes, and proceeded to well, beat her into the ground, if Asha was honest.

She was so bruised she almost forgot the conversation had even happened, until she saw Cullen the next day. She was walking through the courtyard with Cole, and saw the exact moment when the Commander noticed her from the top of the staircase. He tensed up and paled at the very sight of her. For a second, she thought to question the amount of self-preservation that a mage fraternising with a spirit directly in front of a templar might possess, but then remembered that Cole had the ability to essentially erase himself from everyone’s vision. It was the simple act of their paths crossing that caused the Commander’s entire body to tense up as if expecting a blow. 

“Dreams again, woke up shaking. But though the whispers crawled inside, they were just whispers. Easy to drown out. The clash of steel, the rumble of voices, the laughter, _her_ laughter-”

“Cole,” Asha warned, as she sometimes had to when he began speaking of things she didn’t think were hers to hear. They were walking past the healers’ tents, and if someone there had a crush on one of their doctors, she shouldn’t be party to it. The boy nodded, and then whispered, “he wants to talk to you,” before vanishing from her side.

“Inquisitor, I was hoping to speak with you,” Cullen said as he descended the steps, in that same overtly formal tone she’d used when they’d first met and was deliberately keeping things glacial. 

“Good morning, Cullen,” she said, pointedly emphasising the greeting, “and of course - your office?”

“My apologies. Good morning,” he replied, having the decency to look a little shamefaced, “I’m a little - well - I guess it’ll be easier to explain.”

“Sure,” Asha said with a shrug. She followed him up to his tower. She hadn’t been in his office much - most of the military stuff was fed to her in briefings, where she tried her best to offer up an intelligent opinion but often ended up just nodding and checking in on the numbers of recruits, which were the kind of statistics she understood. Since everyone now knew she couldn’t read Common, she’d been planning to set up individual meetings with her advisors in order to get spoken versions of their reports - but then Anders had happened, and suddenly the idea of asking for a one-on-one with any of them made her feel very uncomfortable. 

“That’s a lot of bookshelves,” she commented off-handedly, giving a cursory glance around the room. “It’s a shame that the windows aren’t bigger. There’s barely any light in here for reading in the first place.”

“This room was designed to be Skyhold’s defensive outpost during an attack, in order to ensure that there would always be eyes on the bridge. The windows are small so that lookouts didn’t risk their lives,” he told her. When she gave him a flat look, he said, “sorry, military history. I’ve been reading what I can on this place's past. It’s strange that, given the ready fortress, the territory hasn’t been claimed by Ferelden or Orlais, or even the Avvar.”

“Ahh yes - military history, your one true love,” she teased, but when he didn’t rise to the bait she found herself just standing there, awkwardly, having mildly insulted him. “Are you... ok? You seem very serious, today.”

Which for Cullen, was frankly saying something. But it definitely added an extra dimension, when her presence seemed about as comfortable to him as walking barefoot across a valley of pins. 

“I suppose I am, a little,” he said tiredly, moving to stand behind his desk, and looking anywhere but at her face, “as leader of the Inquisition, you… there’s something I must tell you.”

“...Ok?”

“How much do you know about templars?” he asked.

When she gave him a very particular look, both eyebrows raised in a way that she hoped communicated her utter mortification at that entire question. He finally glanced at her, and sighed, “let me rephrase that: how much do you know about templars and lyrium?”

“You’re like mages,” she said, with certainty, “you take lyrium to boost your powers, and to replenish when you run dry.”

When Cullen gave her a very particular look of his own, equal parts tired and exasperated, she added, “... right?”

“We are similar to mages, I suppose, but there is one key difference,” he told her, “ _you_ don't actually need lyrium to perform magic. It bolsters your connection to the Fade, helps you with power for big workings, but it’s a supplement, not a requisite. For a templar, by contrast, lyrium is a requirement - it artificially cultivates the connection to magic that mages naturally have. Without lyrium, none of our spells would work.”

“So…”

“So, we take a lot more lyrium than you do, in a much more concentrated form. We have to, in order to perform our job.”

“Well yeah, it’s not like me or Deshanna had a bunch of lyrium ore just lying around in the middle of the forest. I never really used it before I came here. It tastes fucking vile to me, honestly… I don’t know how you can stand it.” 

Cullen winced, like Asha’s words had given him physical pain. “...Cullen?” she asked, tentatively, leaning over the desk trying to work out what’s wrong. And though she still hadn't received an answer, she repeated the only question she could seem to ask: “Are you ok?”

“From a very young age, a templar takes lyrium, in order to access and harness their abilities,” he told her, and she could tell he was fighting to keep his voice level, his eyes pinned on the desk in front of him, “and lyrium… well, it’s addictive. In all forms, but far more so in the form we take, than in the diluted potion a mage would ingest.”

“Oh, like Samson,” she said, aiming to be encouraging, as he clearly was struggling with their conversation. She genuinely didn’t understand what this was leading to, but she’d try her best to get him to the destination. “You said he became an addict and that might be why he’s now working with Corypheus? He was addicted to lyrium, right? Does that happen often?”

This time, Cullen literally tensed up, and Asha froze as well, a flash of guilt thrilling through her stomach. She was blundering through this conversation, stabbing blindly and somehow finding all the vital organs. “You really don’t know anything, do you?” he murmured, almost to himself, placing a hand to his forehead. If it hadn’t been in such a soft, heartbroken tone of voice, Asha might have been offended.

“Um…”

“ _Every_ templar is addicted to lyrium, Asha. It grants us our abilities, but it controls us as well. _All_ of us. Those cut off from it suffer - some go mad, others die.”

“I’m sorry… what?”

“Oh, there is no need for concern at present - we have secured a reliable source of lyrium for the templars here, and it is relatively easy, given the fact that we have access to the mages’ supplier and the Order is now… taking a different brand of the stuff, rather bottoming out the market. But what I wanted to tell you - what you need to know, as Inquisitor - is that I… no longer take it.”

Asha stood there, staring at him in mute horror. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

Cullen misunderstood her shock, and blundered onward, “I’m sorry, it was not - I made the decision when I first joined the Inquisition, long before you arrived with us. It’s been months now - I genuinely thought it was no longer an issue, that perhaps I was working through the withdrawal without problems, which is why I didn't disclose the information before now. My templar abilities didn’t seem to be needed, and the side effects have not yet affected my work, and we weren’t exactly on speaking terms...”

He sighed, “but now we are fraternising with An- with an extremely powerful abomination, and I personally feel it is irresponsible of me to withhold my abilities when they could be of use, under the circumstances. I think would be best if I began taking lyrium again, which was what you saw me talking to Cassandra about yesterday. I realised it was bad form of me to keep you out of the conversation, given that it pertains directly to those you rely on in your chain of command.”

Asha swallowed, licked her lips, and finally spoke, repeating her previous words with more force, “I’m sorry… _what?_ ”

Cullen looked up at her, confused, “Inquisitor, if you are offended, of course I understand. But it really was not my intention to withhold information from you…”

“No, no, no, not that, go back a bit,” Asha said quickly, her brain trying to process the ridiculous things she’d just been told. “You’re… you’re seriously telling me that lyrium is a harmful substance, and that _every_ templar is a lyrium addict?”

“Well, not in the way that Samson is an ‘addict’,” Cullen hurried to reassure her, “his affliction was a product of being abruptly cut off from his supply-”

“- So they’re all _high functioning_ lyrium addicts, so long as they still have access to lyrium, which I presume the Order provides?” she turned to him for confirmation, and when he nodded, she looked even more horrified, “does the Chantry know about this? Did the Circles?”

“Of course they do,” he said, frowning. “Why wouldn’t they?”

“ _Then why the fuck do they still allow you all to take it?_ ” 

Cullen blinked at her, “well, they need us to have our abilities, I suppose.”

“So they’re… they’re the ones _making_ you take it? Even though it's addictive?” Asha’s voice was shrill and her mind was whirling, struggling to catch up, “I - are you fucking kidding me? This isn’t some clandestine information kept within the Order to… to give you the edge, or whatever, this is just _accepted fact?_ Did you know, before you became a templar?”

“I… well, I knew I’d be taking lyrium to access magic, but they didn’t really explain in detail… I’d always wanted to be a templar, so I didn’t think much of the risk, when they first gave it to me,” Cullen trailed off, surprised by the spasm of anger that clouded across Asha’s face, which for once was seemingly not directed at him, “Inquisitor, I really don’t understand…”

“What… what the fuck is wrong with you!?”

Oh, maybe it _was_ directed at him. “I… Excuse me?”

“I’m sorry,” Asha said quickly, as she suddenly began pacing, “that’s really rude, it’s just… _why?_ Are you really telling me, off-hand, that you’ve been drugged and forcibly addicted to lyrium for over half your life, and yet what strikes you as unconscionable about the situation is the fact that you’re trying to come off the harmful substance in question and you’re worried about the way it might impact _me?_ I just - is it - I don’t - I mean - _why?_ ”

“I- well-”

“It’s just… how can you accept that? How can you say it so… so fucking casually? I mean - I get Vivienne. I understand _Vivienne_. She loves the Circles because it seems to me that she’s never had to fucking live in one, but _you_ -” she span, let out an angry, indignant breath through her nose, and began pacing again, “I’m sorry, I’m really angry. This is fucking ridiculous.” She stopped, looking at him, “You’re saying people _die_ from this? That coming off lyrium could kill you?”

“I mean, it hasn’t yet.”

“But it _could_. It’s difficult to give up, right?”

“...Yes.”

“And you’re not… you’re not angry? You’re just… worried? About what it means for _me_ , of all people?”

“I’ve made my peace with what giving up lyrium might mean - where it might lead me,” Cullen admitted, after a few seconds of only Asha’s laboured, angry breathing in the silence, “after what happened in Kirkwall, I couldn’t… I will not be bound to the Order, or that life, any longer. Whatever the suffering, I accept it. But I would not put the Inquisition at risk.”

“Who gives a fuck about the Inquisition? Seriously, what is _wrong_ with you?”

“Um, Inquisitor?” Cullen knew what it was like to face Asha Lavellan’s anger. He’d even had the experience of being yelled at by her. What he really wasn’t sure how to cope with was Asha Lavellan berating him in a way that seemed almost… like she was, well, on _his_ side. Aggressively so, it would seem.

“So what if you’ve accepted the suffering? Why the fuck did you have to suffer in the first place? So you could kill mages and make them tranquil?” Cullen froze as Asha pinned him with a look of incandescent rage. He watched her fists spasm and clench like she wanted to hit something, and then she resumed pacing again, as if it was all she could do with her brewing fury, “and you _wanted_ to be a templar - what about all the kids who just needed a fucking job? A way to feed their family? Do you think they deserved to become fucking addicts, do you think they consented to that?” she threw up her hands, and shrieked, loud enough that probably half his guards heard, “This whole fucking system is fucking batshit crazy!”

She was making him almost dizzy, the frenetic way she was stalking around his office. “Asha, if you could just…”

“Cassandra is right!” she said, forcefully, coming to a halt and whirling on him, eyes fiery with that depthless anger, “of course you shouldn’t take lyrium again - against your own will, no less! And how dare you think I’d ever ask that of you? I would never let you to do that, not for the Inquisition, not for the sake of any of the decisions I’ve made, not for anyone. Dread Wolf take me, how could anyone ask that - of anybody?!! That’s just… that’s just fucking evil. _I’ll_ take care of Anders, if it comes to that - I’m more than capable!”

She finally stopped ranting to take a full breath, running her hands - that were quaking, wracked with shakes - through her hair. She bent over, like she’d just run a marathon, and then straightened with a sigh, fury still written plain on her face even as her voice strived for calm, “And, you know what? I’m just going to say it: if a system needs to keep half its people locked away and the other half addicted to drugs to function, then maybe it shouldn’t have been allowed to function at all in the gods-damned first place.”

This wasn’t the first time that Cullen had heard the Inquisitor speak like that, in that cold, detached voice, like she wanted to murder everything in her path. It was truly a force to behold. But never more so than now, when he heard it used on his behalf. As if she was vowing to protect him from every evil she saw threatening him in the world, whether he liked it or not.

Her freckled face was red and mottled with fury, her body was shaking with anger, and her eyes... burned. She looked like a fierce defender, her round features suddenly hard and her mouth a grim, hard line.

“Asha…” he started, softly, and as he spoke it he realised he had absolutely no clue what he was actually going to say.

“I - this - I’m not in a good place,” she muttered suddenly, her shoulders slumping even as her body remained a tense coil, “I… I need to find Cole. Now.”

And then she all but ran from his office, without another word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternative chapter summary: "In which the author just rants at the ridiculous worldbuilding of the Dragon Age franchise, through the medium of her protagonist." 
> 
> Or: "In which the Inquisitor gives the most aggressive pep-talk of all time."
> 
> Or maybe: "In which Cullen is scared into having a crush."
> 
> I had way, WAY too much fun writing this chapter. I hope it's just as much fun to read!! (Please just ignore how much the POVs are all over the place, I considered doing an official switch but really didn't want to cut off Asha when she's mid-furious-monologue).
> 
> I figured, as a Dalish elf, Asha has no idea how actually Circles operate and kind of just hates them on principle. So needless to say, finding out exactly how fucked up the entire thing is is quite a shock to the system.
> 
> Hope everyone's keeping well and still enjoying the long, convoluted journey. I'm quite far ahead in my draft, so coming back and revising these chapters is a bit wild for me. Not going to lie, the next chapter is also just some really, really good, self-indulgent shit (if I do say so myself). It involves swords. So you all have that to look forward to next week :D xxxx


	43. Chapter Forty-Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha gets a spirit blade.

Commander Helaine, her Knight Enchanter teacher, arrived the next day.

Which was good, because Asha really, _really_ wanted to stab something.

Cole had found her damn near hyperventilating, hidden in the rafters of the Herald's Rest were no one could see the Inquisitor have another breakdown. This time over the fate of _templars_ , no less. She just… couldn’t get her head around it. She was furious. People used lyrium in this way? People made _money_ off lyrium this way? People had let _her_ mindlessly down lyrium potions in the aftermath of Redcliffe, without explaining any of the manifold ways it could poison her?

In truth, even though the idea of lyrium addiction was horrifying, that wasn’t what had thrown her world off-kilter with all the ceremony of a bottle to the back of the skull. Asha couldn’t grapple with a system where templars suffered as well. The Circles made some brutal sort of sense to her, if it was one group of people enslaved and imprisoned for the entertainment of another. If everyone involved was miserable then, Creators curse her, _why?_

Cole murmured at her side, “they feel older than they look. They've been changed, and their bodies are incomplete now. The lyrium helps, but their bodies always want to connect to... something older. Bigger than they are. That's why they block magic. They reach for that other thing, and magic has no room to come in.”

Asha raked her fingers through her hair with a groan. She wanted her templars to stay faceless monsters, who’d never known hardship or pain, who just inflicted violence mindlessly, and so remained the clear, obvious villains. She didn’t want them to exist in shades of grey. She certainly didn’t want to feel _sympathy_ for them, they were still _evil_ , and they’d done an evil thing…

Cole’s hand ghosting over her shoulder made some of the maelstrom in her head quieten. It wasn’t like Solas casting his spell on her - none of the emotions raging within her dampened even a fraction. It was just that they became easier to bear in the quiet knowledge that the spirit was there, weathering the storm with her. He knew exactly how much her chest hurt, how red flashed behind her eyelids, and how she felt like she was grasping at threads that frayed and quickly evaded her grasp, that snapped like spider silk. “Everyone bears scars,” the spirit said, in that innocent, straightforward way of his, “they’re not all shaped like yours. But that doesn’t mean they should carve them into other people.”

She liked Cole. He got to the heart of things.

“Commander Helaine was hoping to assess your skill level, Inquisitor,” Grand Enchanter Fiona informed her the next morning, after she’d shaken hands with the reedy, dark-haired, and severe looking elven woman. “I’ve informed her that you can already conjure the blade, meaning you are well ahead of the average student who chooses the path of the Knight Enchanter.”

“I would like to see your skill in melee,” said Helaine, in her sharp, clipped voice, “it is all very well being the summoner of a spectral blade - to be its mistress is another matter entirely.”

Despite having already completed her morning training with Cassandra and bathed afterwards, Asha was more than eager to lose herself in another round of combat, “why not? If you'd allow me time to change, I’m free now.”

She changed into light leathers and a dark vest top, secured her hair tightly at the back of her head, then met Helaine on the training ground in the lower courtyard. She guessed there was significance of the woman’s choice of venue. As soon as they started flinging glowing swords around, they’d gather an audience in seconds. This, too, was probably some kind of a test - but then the Commander wasn’t to be acquainted with how many times Asha had had her ass kicked by Cass in full view of all of the Inquisition. 

She approached, “Commander Helaine.”

“Inquisitor,” she replied, and then flung something at Asha, which she was proud to actually catch. She felt the heft of cold metal, and looked down to find a sword hilt in her hand. It was made of silver metal, that seemed to glint blue at certain angles. 

“Wow, right away?” she said, while she adjusted surreptitiously to the weight.

“Hold and declare, Inquisitor,” Helaine ordered sharply. It seemed it was, indeed, _right away_.

“...Um…?”

“I ask your intent. I was summoned to oversee your training, and I would know my charge.”

That was exactly the kind of shit that Deshanna would’ve asked, and for a second Asha’s heart spasmed. This woman was slightly younger, wore Circle robes, and had no vallaslin on her face, but that thought gave Asha the answer she needed: “ _Dirth'ena enasalin_.” 

‘The Knowledge That Led to Victory’. That's what she wanted.

Helaine eyes snapped to hers for a second, assessing what she saw there, and then she nodded once. “Begin.”

Asha assumed that meant ‘summon the blade’. She held her hand out in front of her like she was entering a garde position, and then stared at the dead, cold metal in her hand. The last hilt she’d held had been an heirloom of her clan, inherited from an arcane warrior amongst her ancestors. _Oh well_ , she thought - it was better than letting her hand get torn to shit and bleeding all over the floor of Redcliffe Keep. She muttered the enchantment, and there was a flash of bright light as the blade extended up in front of her, with a crackle of energy that raised the hairs on her arms.

“Good,” Helaine said, as the sword wavered and reformed in front of her face. “The casting is a variation on the true method, but the binding is strong. It will remain that way, until you make a hit.”

With the hilt holding the spell stable, the blade didn’t cost much mana to maintain. Unprompted, Asha gave it an experimental swing - the air sang where the sharp edge of magic passed through.

“How much do you know of swordsmanship?” Helaine asked.

“I don’t claim to be skilled,” Asha responded. She had fought with daggers, and started working with spirit blades in the Clan. She’d also observed and mimicked some of Cass’ techniques while on missions. But she really didn’t think that any of those things counted much when faced with the scrutiny of a military officer.

“We shall see,” Helaine said, lips pursed. Then, without warning, she lunged.

There was a flash of light as the woman’s own spirit blade flared into existence, and then Commander Helaine was upon her. With a small yelp, Asha hurriedly raised her blade to meet her attacker. At the last moment, she felt the blade… _move_ , adjusting in her hand, and there was a flare of energy as their swords clashed and she deflected the blow.

Helaine kept moving, and every place her sword tried to reach Asha somehow managed to stop with another discordant crash and flash of light. She hated to think how much it would fucking hurt if the spectral blade actually connected with her flesh. 

It was only now, facing off against this new opponent, that she realised that what Cullen had said about her fighting Cassandra was absolutely true: she’d been making things difficult for herself. Commander Helaine was taller than her, because nearly everyone was, but she was also wiry, the veins on her arms and wrists protruding - absolutely nothing compared to the bulwark that was Cassandra Pentaghast in armour. Her strength was paltry compared to the Seeker, and Asha’s own weaknesses were compensated for by the change in weapon. With the weight of the spirit blade barely nothing, Asha was free to move in a way that she just couldn’t when encumbered by a staff.

But that still didn’t explain how she made it through the first round of sparring. If anything, the new weightlessness of combat threw her off as she overcompensated in strikes that now required less strength. Although she was moving to meet the Commander’s blows, she knew her movements were sloppy and reckless - yet somehow, she parried each stab with precision. The sword seemed to almost be meeting the blows of its own accord.

“What… the… fuck?” she hissed, chest heaving, as Helaine stepped back, nodded to herself, and then began circling for her next round of attacks. 

“The blade Fiona requested for you is one of our strongest,” Helaine said, as Asha shifted into a defensive position, watching the woman make an assessment of her form. “The spirit of valour inside is eager for both glory and blood. Part of leading is learning to obey the instincts that will preserve you in battle.”

“Huh. Well, then,” Asha said, and before Helaine could finish circling her, she adjusted the sword in her grip and leapt forward.

There was a commotion outside Cullen’s office. 

He only noticed it when, looking up from the documents he’d been absorbed in reviewing, he realised that all of the lieutenants he was to be meeting with on the hour were five minutes late to their appointment. Then he heard a cheer through the closed doors between his office and the library, and went outside to investigate.

His men, a handful of Inquisition scouts and guards, along with both Dorian and Solas, were all peering over the edge of the walkway to observe activity in the courtyard below. Cullen walked up to join the two men and then looked over himself, just as a flash of gold light took him by surprise.

Two figures were dancing around each other in one of the sparring grounds. For a second, he almost thought they were templars, the glow of their swords reminding him of the energy that built up in a purge. Then the two blades clashed again with another halo of gold energy, and he saw light didn’t reflect off armour. Both figures were in robes, and when he saw the flash of coppery red and heard a high pitched yelp, he realised that one of them was the Inquisitor.

“She almost had her, there,” Dorian murmured.

“Asha seems to have it somewhat in hand,” Solas replied, tersely.

Asha had shied to the left to avoid the other mage’s lunge. Now she span and arched her blade over her head and downwards, meeting the woman’s block in a shower of sparks. She span again and made a feint to the side before trying to hit the woman’s waist - she was also met and parried once more.

“Oh come _on_!” Asha’s frustrated cry echoed up the walls of Skyhold as she backed away. Cullen had observed enough of her technique to know that that was one of the most complex moves she currently had in her repertoire.

“How long have they been fighting?” Cullen asked.

“Oh, we’re about seven minutes in,” Dorian replied easily, “but given that we all expected her to go down within thirty seconds, I have to admit that it’s all become rather thrilling.”

“The instructor is seemingly refusing to break until there’s bloodshed,” Solas explained from Dorian’s other side, “so far Asha’s stopped her from landing a hit, but she will soon tire. The woman is toying with her. I think it’s merely a matter of observing how long she’ll last.”

“Well, I find it rather impressive. I thought she couldn’t even wield a sword in the first place,” Dorian remarked, “isn’t that why she and the Seeker grapple like barbarians every day?”

Asha and her opponent circled each other. Asha’s steps were a wary mirror, like she was feeling out the path, while the other woman was certain and sure-footed. “Don’t you want to know what a spectral blade does to flesh, Inquisitor?” the Knight Enchanter asked in a sharp, measured voice.

“Um... acquainted with that… actually,” was the breathless, harried response, and then Cullen winced as Asha darted in, in a reckless and ill-considered move that somehow refined itself as it happened. What was a reckless lunge became cleaner, if not at all threatening: a series of quickfire blows to the right side that the woman parried without even moving. He willed the Inquisitor to feint, but she didn’t, and then the woman locked blades with her and shoved her bodily backwards, arms pinwheeling. Asha seemed to be able to move like a swordswoman, but had none of the strategy to deduce her opponent’s weaknesses. As if she was trying out the moves to test herself, and not the enemy.

But similarly, the woman she was fighting did not press the obvious advantage, instead letting the Inquisitor find her footing. Her chest was heaving, bedraggled strands of hair falling down into her face.

“ _Fenedhis_ , just end it!” Asha groaned, as if she knew the woman was playing at defeating her.

“Give me a reason to.”

Although they were too far away to hear it, Cullen could imagine the frustrated huff of breath Asha would give when prompted by such a taunt. She lunged forward again.

“Although the spell only expels power when contact is made, it takes concentration to maintain the blade’s shape,” Solas observed quietly, “she’s testing how long Asha can hold the binding.”

“No, she’s not,” Cullen replied, frowning as he watched Asha’s brush hair out of her eyes, retreating after a set of blows that he could see had startled her with their own effectiveness. She’d restrained herself, in that move. “Asha’s holding back. She’s seeing how long it takes for the Inquisitor to attempt a killing blow.”

Solas gave him a sharp look, that Cullen wasn’t sure how to interpret.

“Well, can you blame her?” Dorian reasoned, “who knows what that thing would do to a person? I’d certainly advise caution.”

This time, Cullen and Solas shared a look. ‘Caution’ was not something you’d immediately associate with Asha Lavellan.

As if echoing his thoughts, something within Asha seemed to suddenly snap. Her hair a wild banner behind her head, now almost entirely loose from its tie, she aimed her blade at her opponent, swinging it in a shining arc that aimed to cleave the woman clean in two. 

The other mage met the blade, but was shunted back a few steps with the force, almost overbalancing. Cullen held his breath, and felt himself grinning when this time Asha pushed the advantage, breaking only to slam the blade down again with a ferocious snarl, one that could’ve only been learnt from Cassandra.

Then, in a move even Cullen couldn’t see, the mage stopped her. She forced Asha’s arm upwards and then _slapped_ the blade out of the Inquisitor’s grip with her free hand, sending the hilt tumbling across the grass as the spirit blade sputtered and died, and then…

She slammed her own blade directly through Asha’s chest.

The world went white for a second, and the next time it came back into focus Cullen was halfway down the steps into the courtyard, unsurprised to find Solas on his other side. They both took the stairs two at a time and sprinted for the sparring ground. There must’ve been a mistake - the appointment had been made by Grand Enchanter Fiona, Leliana must not have vetted the instructor properly, she must’ve been a spy placed within the ranks of the Rebel Mages, allowed to stroll right in - and Cullen’s chest spasmed with the knowledge that he’d failed her, _again_...

They ran into the sparring ring, and both of them came to a stumbling halt, foolishly, when they saw Asha standing there, entirely upright. The Inquisitor’s eyes were wide as saucers as she stared at the other woman, a hand on her heaving sternum, searching for a wound that it seemed wasn’t there.

“Now you understand,” the mage said in that same calm, level tone, “the spectral blade _knows_. It will cut through armour like butter, it will burn the flesh of your enemies as if it was never even there. But it knows your allies, so long as you know them too. Fight without clarity, and others may fall. But remain clear and defined in your purpose - know your objectives, know what it is you fight for, and you can trust your weapon to bring harm only to those you wish to hurt.”

Asha’s breath was ragged with exertion, hands still clutching at the place where they’d all expected a gaping, bloody hole to be. “Fuck… me…”

“Fiona was correct. Your skill is pleasing. I will train you,” her instructor said, dusting down the front of her robe and clipping her empty hilt to her belt. Unlike Asha, she had barely a hair out of place. “Be here tomorrow, same time and place.”

Asha gave a shaky nod and a salute as the woman span on her heel and strode away. Then, all at once her body deflated in an exhausted sigh, and she took a stumbling step back as if her knees had given way from under her. “Dread Wolf take me,” she breathed, looking a little like she was going to be sick.

Cullen cast an assessing eye across the ground and saw the glint of blue: the ornamental spirit blade hilt lay on the ground a few feets away, where the woman had batted it out of Asha’s hand. He walked over and picked it up, hoping nobody amongst the Inquisitor’s audience noticed how shaky his own legs were.

When he looked up, Solas had made his way to her side. “Asha, are you -”

“I’m fine,” she told him quickly, smoothing her shaking hands across the front of the vest she wore. 

“You just got stabbed.”

“Well, then I guess it’s pretty much like any other day of the week,” Asha retorted with a slightly breathless laugh. When her friend reached out to put a steadying hand on her shoulder, she bodily ducked away from it. “Seriously, I said I’m _fine_.”

Solas frowned, his mouth clamping into a tight line, before he then took a noticeable step back.

“I mean, Deshanna used to throw me at fire mines,” she continued needlessly, also taking a hasty step back. “Life-or-death experiences are pretty much how I learn all my magic.”

“Erm... Inquisitor?” Cullen said awkwardly, walking up to her and offering up the empty sword hilt, in the aim of breaking whatever strange tension passed between her and the other mage.

“Thanks,” Asha said with a grateful smile, taking it from him and then… just holding it in her hands, because unlike her new instructor, she had nowhere convenient to put it. 

There was a beat of silence, as she looked down at the hilt, her chest still shuddering with ragged breaths. “So…” She let out another shaky sigh, then looked up at the two of them, and _beamed_ , “how… fucking amazing was that? Pretty fucking amazing, I think!”

Cullen couldn’t help but smile back, something twisting in his chest. The sight of Asha Lavellan after sparring had become an habitual torture, one he’d attempted ineffectually to numb himself to once he realised it would be greeting him every morning on his own training ground. Her chest and face flushed bright red, her hair a dishevelled mess of flyaway strands around her face, the sheen of sweat cooling on her skin, and the wild, elated look in her bright blue eyes - like she couldn’t believe what she’d done and took absolute, utter pride in it. And that was _before_ the freckles - the millions of them, spattered across her arms and cheeks and the gradually strengthening swoop of her shoulders, so many of them that Cullen could barely equate this woman with the pale, wasted thing they’d plucked out of the ruins of the Temple of Sacred Ashes.

Now she was grinning at him, asking him to share in her moment of victory even though she’d literally just been defeated, and he was beginning to realise just how much he’d failed to make himself immune to the sight of her.

“I didn’t realise the spirit in the blade would fix all the things I’m shit at!” she was babbling on, “it’s a magic, mistake-correcting sword. I’m fucking serious! It guided me through the hits. It adjusted my angles - my _angles_ , guys! You, at least,” she gestured to Cullen, though he had no idea what she was referring to, with that terminology, “must know how bad my angles are. I’m going to be fucking unstoppable!”

“That was pretty hot, Boss,” came an appreciative rumble behind Cullen, and he turned to see the Iron Bull and a few of his men, watching from where they’d been training outside the tavern in their usual spot.

“Fuck yeah it was!” Asha squealed, delighted, “the woman barely even worked up a sweat, and then she stabbed me, _with magic_!”

“Not exactly what I meant,” Bull replied with a wink, but Asha seemed to ignore him, to start grilling Solas on how exactly a ‘spirit of valour’ was formed and under what circumstances. The qunari caught Cullen staring at him, and quirked his eyebrow in a knowing look of _‘you understand exactly what I’m saying’_ , that Cullen resolutely pretended not to notice. He scratched at the back of his neck, glancing around to see how many people had noticed him sprint unnecessarily to the Inquisitor’s aid. Then he realised he was also going to be late to his own meeting. 

He began a hasty retreat back to the stairwell, figuring his absence would go unnoticed, when he heard the Inquisitor say “give me a second,” and suddenly felt her hand on his arm.

He swallowed nervously, turning to look down at her, “Inquisitor?”

“Hi? Hi!” she said, as her hand dropped back to her side. Behind her, he saw Solas watching them with a perplexed look on his face, “I meant to come by your office later, but now is as good a time as any, I guess.” She lowered her voice slightly, “I wanted to apologise, for yesterday. For yelling at you.”

He felt the corner of his mouth twitch, “forgive me, Asha, but you yell at me all the time.”

“No I don’t!” she said, her voice rising again, then winced, realising she was almost yelling right that second. “Well, in this case, I was yelling at you for something that is very much not your fault, and also swearing, and then I also just kind of ran away. Which is what I wanted to apologise for, specifically.”

“The running away?”

“The whole thing,” she sighed, raking a hand through her hair and combing one side of it back into place so that her undercut was once more visible, while the other side remained a tangled mess. “You… do you want to walk?”

“I need to get back to my office,” he admitted.

“Ok,” she turned back to Solas. “I have something I need to talk through with the Commander! Would you be free to explain Valour in a bit? I want to get to know my sword.”

“Of course, _lethallan_ ,” Solas replied, hands carefully held behind his back, his face an unreadable mask.

Without another backwards glance, Asha trailed Cullen up to the foot of the stairs, then glanced around to check the crowd that had watched her fight was dispersing. “I just… I realised that you put your trust in me, telling me about… that, and in response I kind of just ranted at you, then bolted, which was very much not the pinnacle of leadership,” she said, her eyes planted on the steps in front of her as they started to climb. “And also just… rude. So I’m sorry.”

“I confess, I didn’t really mind.” Cullen had been so wildly unprepared for her reaction to the situation, that it hadn’t even crossed his mind to be offended. He’d just been left standing in his office, utterly perplexed. 

There had been some nightmare versions of that conversation in his head, where Asha had told him that lyrium was exactly the punishment templars deserved.

“Well, you should mind!” she said, a that same indignant note from yesterday resurfacing in her voice, “you’re a person, going through a…” another nervous glance as a scout passed them on the stairwell, “ _thing_ , and me yelling at you isn’t going to make it any easier. Plus, you asked for my ruling on something, and I was incredibly incoherent the entire time. I needed to clear that part up as well.”

They reached the ramparts and she paused, lips pursed together in a line. “To be clear, I don’t think I have any say in your decision, one way or another,” she told him, carefully, rocking on her heels, “but I meant what I said yesterday. If you’re changing your mind on my account, or because of the wider Inquisition, please don’t. I don’t think I can deal with that on my conscience, and I really don’t think you owe anyone in this world that kind of loyalty.”

“Inquisitor-”

“Nope. I’m not finished!” she said hastily, “I got no fucking sleep, rehearsing this speech!” 

She coughed awkwardly, before continuing, “When I accidentally heard you speaking with Cassandra, you seemed to be saying you were useless… You’re not. I don’t think it’s good leadership to treat people only by the measure of what they do for you, but if you want me to do that, then I’m going to say it: you’re perfectly useful to me and the Inquisition just the way you are. You think I would’ve put up with you this long if you weren’t?! You train all of our soldiers, you’re managing most of the relief work _I_ committed us to, and you have an actual idea of what to do in battles, while I’m absolutely clueless. And I also meant what I said about… Hawke’s friend. I’m really, _really_ bad at seeing bigger pictures, but that means I’d be the perfect candidate to throw at one abomination in a fit of pique, if it really came down to it. With my new magic, badass sword.” 

She quirked a smile at him. “And, surprising _absolutely no one_ , I, personally, really do not mind whether or not you have any fancy templar powers. Like, if they’re important to you, fair enough, but from my point of view… well, I could definitely take them or leave them.” She winked, probably to signal she was making a bad joke. But honestly, it just left him flustered.

“That’s… what you rehearsed?” he said weakly. 

“The wink was too much, wasn’t it?”

“I’ll treasure it always, Inquisitor,” he said, with mock severity, placing a hand over his heart. He was dismayed to find it absolutely thundering in his chest.

Asha bit her lip (which wasn’t helping) and seemed to hesitate before speaking again, “and, well, you’re doing… ok, right? Because you made it sound like sometimes people doing this… aren’t… ok.”

“I’m ok,” he confirmed, though he did not mention the insomnia, the headaches, or… well… the dreams that greeted him if he did actually manage to sleep. “I’m perfectly well, at this moment in time.”

“And if you weren’t… you’d tell someone? It doesn’t have to be me! It can be Cassandra, or, you know, someone you actually want to talk about it with.”

“Cassandra has promised me she will keep an eye on my condition,” he told her. “Now that you are also informed, I’ll tell her she can come to you with any concerns.”

“Only if you’re ok with that!”

“I am ok with that.”

“I - ah - is Cassandra also on lyrium?”

“...No,” Cullen said, “Seekers come by their abilities through a different manner of training.”

“Oh thank the gods,” Asha breathed in a huff of relief, “I’m still struggling to process how fucked up this all is.”

“I thought you’d be… well, I thought you’d be taking this differently.”

“You probably thought I wouldn’t care, right? Because I hate templars?”

Cullen sighed, rubbing the back of his neck, “I’d hardly blame you for thinking our hardship is dwarfed in comparison to yours.”

“Mythal’s tits, Cullen,” she said, “it’s hardly a competition. I’m not _heartless _. There’s a difference between being afraid of templars because they murdered my entire fucking family and, you know, endorsing wholesale indentured servitude, for fucked-up reasons I still don’t understand.”__

__“Indenture?” Cullen said, confused. He’d never really thought of it like that._ _

__“I mean, I’m not going to lie, I’d much prefer it if you - not _you_ , sorry, I mean templars - didn’t suddenly have a convenient excuse for all your actions. And I’m also seeing why, in this clusterfuck you call a ‘functional system’, people in the past may not have been held entirely accountable for the awful and inhumane things that they’ve done. As far as I’m concerned templars still have agency - but gods, what if you don’t?” Asha was babbling now, “Does anyone even know what lyrium _is_? What it’s side effects are? I remain horrified by the fact that this is even a _thing_ I need to consider in the first place."_ _

__“I-”_ _

__“Sorry, I’m ranting at you again,” she sighed. “At least I’m not angry this time.”_ _

__“You’re not?”_ _

__“Ok,” she admitted in a mumble, accompanied by a guilty shrug, “maybe a little angry. But not at you!”_ _

__When Cullen chuckled, she gave him a pleased smile, dimples flashing. It left him feeling a little floored, if only because it was the first time she’d ever seemed comfortable in his presence._ _

__There were many other reasons for feeling floored, of course._ _

__“Thank you, Inquisitor,” Cullen said, “I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. And… err... you really do not have to worry on my account, or on the account of the wider Order, frankly. There probably won’t be anything of us left to worry over, once this has run its full course.”_ _

__“...Are _you_ comforting _me_ over the welfare of templars, by telling me all of them will be destroyed?” Asha said, and then snorted, adorably. “I think our relationship officially became weird.”_ _

__She truly had no idea._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Them: You do realise that swordfights are only sexy when they're *between* the love interests, right?  
> Me: I'M SORRY, I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER HOW HOT SPIRIT BLADES ARE!!? *MAGES*! *WITH*! *SWORDS*!
> 
> This remains one of my favourite chapters in the fic, so I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I did. Who am I, if I'm not just needlessly worldbuilding aspects of the Dragon Age magic system, and explaining away why friendly fire isn't a thing when you flail around with a spirit blade in game?
> 
> I also have some exciting news!! I got a commission slot with one of my favourite artists, [Annalise Jensen](https://twitter.com/may12324/media) (@may12324 on both tumblr and twitter) and now have a portrait of Asha! With a spirit blade! 
> 
> [You can see it here, on my tumblr!](https://bit.ly/2Zhg2ds)
> 
> (Do people on this site still use tumblr? oh well. Have a cute picture of my Inquisitor, regardless!)


	44. Chapter Forty-Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Emerald Graves, and the Western Approach.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: slight body horror, violence, hate speech, references to past abuse (basically, there's a shitty Red Templar in this chapter)

A week later, Leliana received a note from Hawke, and Asha prepared to leave for the Western Approach.

At the same time, Leliana also handed intelligence on Samson over to Cullen, informing them of Red Templar activity in the Emerald Graves. When they discussed dispatching scouts to investigate in the war room meeting - it was somewhat of a problem, apparently, because so many of them were currently based in Val Royeux trying to gather information on Celene’s precarious position within Court - Asha piped up and said, “um… well, isn’t that kind of on my way?”

The afternoon before she set out, she surprised Cullen with a knock on the door of his office and coffee stolen from Josephine’s study, and he briefed her on the situation. The coffee was bribery for the fact she was making him take an hour out of his ridiculous schedule to talk her through what she should’ve been able to glean from a five page document. She wouldn’t be able to read the smugglers’ notes herself, but she was taking Cassandra with her and the Seeker would know what to look for.

“I can put my men on this, you don’t have to go actively seeking out templars,” Cullen told her when they’d both finished their drinks. She’d kept throwing him off over the course of the meeting, when he started pointing to lines in the documents scattered between them, and she’d had to gently remind him to read it aloud.

“Maybe I want to,” she said lightly. In truth, she was getting restless, and selfishly wanted an excuse to spend longer in the field, particularly in a place that promised greenery and warmth after just over a month in the wonderful but frigidly cold Skyhold. “Besides, isn’t the Emerald Graves meant to be beautiful?”

“It’s a _war zone_ ,” he said, in a thoroughly unimpressed tone of voice.

“What part of Thedas isn’t, right now?”

Cullen frowned, “...you make a fair point.”

“I’ll take ‘picturesque war zone’ then. You know how it is, stab some red lyrium abominations, soak in some ancient elvhen and Orlesian culture…” when Cullen made a face at her, she laughed, “Bull’s said the Chargers are free to go with us. They’ll guard the routes - try to shut them down while we move onto our rendevous with Sid.”

When their meeting wound down, she paused a little before standing up. “I was also wondering…” she said, fidgeting awkwardly. “I’m having to stall nearly all my lessons, so I’m taking some books on the road with me. I’ve got some from Josie, but Dorian mentioned a history of Knight Enchanters, that apparently you took out of the library? I was wondering if I could borrow it?”

“Why?” She raised an eyebrow, and Cullen winced, “I mean… when you can’t…?”

“Read?” Asha finished for him, before admitting. “Varric has kind of… agreed to recite them aloud to me, while we’re travelling. On the condition that I let him use funny voices.”

Cullen walked over to the bookshelves on the left side of the room, “well, the man does love the sound of his own voice.”

“Ugh, don’t,” Asha said with a groan, “in my defence, I was negotiating from an incredibly weak position. He’s been extremely pissed at me since he found out about… Hawke’s informant. Cass let it slip when she was tipsy,” at Cullen’s worried expression she hurriedly explained, “in Varric’s room, I think, not the tavern or anything stupid like that!”

“His _room?_ ”

“Oh my gods, thank you, I _know_!” she cried, glad someone else finally reacted to that particular part of the story. “Apparently he let her crash in his room out of ‘friendly concern’, because she was shitfaced and he knows the forge 'starts up early' and would be 'killer for the hangover.'”

Cullen made a face, considering, as he pulled a blue cloth-bound book from its place on the shelf and handed it to her. “You do perhaps know that Varric tends to… lie?”

“That had occurred to me, Commander, yes,” she replied dryly. “You’re welcome to ask Cassandra about it, if you want?”

Cullen, to her delight, made a scoffing sound that was almost a snort. “I rather value having all my limbs, Inquisitor,” he said, mirroring her use of titles in a way that suggested he knew that he was being sassy in her presence. He pointed to the book in her hand, “you’ll have to let me know what you think. I pray it isn’t too ‘dry’, for your sake?”

“I will,” she said with a smile, “and as I’m on a journey to becoming a more well-rounded person, you can bake a loaf of bread or something while I’m away. In the spirit of fairness.”

The next day, she left, and didn’t return to Skyhold for a month and a half.

And, to the unspoken surprise of everybody, she left Solas behind.

Of course, leaving Solas behind didn’t actually stop Asha thinking of him. Particularly when she was surrounded by a fuck tonne of weird magical shit, from Grey Wardens summoning demons to ancient Dalish ruins to fucking _giants_ occupying a grove of _Vallasdahlen_ , which she knew Deshanna had visited when she was younger. When she asked Sera if she wanted to see them she’d already known her friend’s answer: “too elfy. What’s wrong with normal trees?”

Cass had started letting Asha dictate silly postscripts to their letters back to Skyhold - and Asha also now insisted on signing her own name at the bottom of every correspondence - but it wasn’t the same. She missed conversations about… magic? Elf things? She figured it was mostly just that she wanted someone to answer her questions, the way Deshanna always used to. The closest thing she’d been able to get was… well… _Anders_. Before he’d split off from them, vowing to infiltrate Adamant as a 'willing' participant in the new Warden army, he’d been happy to answer her questions about the relationship between spirits and mages. Asha worried that she was exploiting the spirit of Valour in her blade - the book Varric was reading to her said not, but she didn’t really trust _shemlen_ on this matter, given that if anyone hinted at communication between spirit and mage, it would’ve probably ended with someone stupid with a sword screaming ‘blood magic’.

“Justice says the spirit inside your blade is mindless,” Anders told her, the morning after she’d bought up the question. She guessed he communicated with the spirit in the Fade, given that she’d not seen him glow recently, and was pretty certain Sera would’ve one-shotted him with an arrow if he had.

“Oh.” Asha couldn’t help but feel a little disappointment alongside relief, as the valour blade had been correcting her form so often in her practices that it had begun to feel almost like an ally.

“Oh, but he meant it as an insult!” the mage said hurriedly, sensing her upset. “What I mean is - apparently your Valour spirit just _bloody loves_ being a sword. Valour spirits tend to be a bit like those of Justice - they are composed of the remnants of those who died seeking out an ideal they never found. The… _longing_ is what causes it to form. Your blade was a legendary warrior who sought glory through combat, so obviously they died pretty young. It seems to welcome the chance to continue that legacy, and will follow you faithfully - kind of like a mabari? What I’m saying is, Justice told me your sword is basically a dog.”

“Did Justice… talk to Valour? To make this assessment? Did they have like, Fade-tea, or something?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” Anders said, with a small wink, “and I really, really didn’t ask.”

“Thanks, Anders. And thanks Justice, I guess.”

The mage gave her a small smile. She guessed Justice rarely ever got thanked, these days. “You’re welcome, Asha.”

Her conversations with him had been a small, diverting blip in what had proven to be a gruelling month. Sid and Varric seemed to be having a great time, being reunited, but they were often the only people talking - particularly as Cass made an obvious point of not engaging them in conversation, still holding a grudge. Asha herself didn’t feel up to matching their banter: this was the longest distance she’d ever travelled when not amongst her Clan, and striking out so far alone just served to make her feel more lonely. The Western Approach was an unpleasant place, and finding cold-blooded murder at their destination hadn’t done much to make the entire journey feel worth it.

She was pretty certain the only time she smiled in that awful desert was when Sera intoned, “The veil has grit in its breeches here.”

And that was still a reminder of Solas, godsdammit!

They made it back to the Emerald Graves in record time, everyone eager to escape that barren wasteland even though they knew they’d probably be making the exact same trek all the way back the moment they got back to Skyhold. Varric started travelling shirtless to try and even out the extremely ludicrous v-shaped tan-line his fashion choices in a desert had left him with - Asha noticed Cassandra attempt in vain to not spend those stretches of time extremely flustered. She made a mental note to relay this new piece of gossip to Cullen, when she got back.

That thought - of saving up news Cullen Rutherford, like he’d actually be interested - startled her, but very few people were close with Cass, and she hardly wanted to attempt the act of gossiping with _Leliana_. It wasn’t the first time she’d had that thought, either. Maybe it was because she was starved of her usual Solas-brand of unending intellectual conversation, but she had so many things she wanted to ask the Commander about that damn Knight Enchanter book. She wanted to ask him about how much he knew about Commander Zephyris, an elf who’d entered the Circle and apparently fostered the Knight Enchanter discipline, commissioning the first spirit blade from an artificer, who she was certain had been his boyfriend (people didn’t make fancy magical swordhilts for just anyone). She also wanted to argue about some things, not least the fact that Arcane Warriors were barely even given a chapter. Instead, the templars were cited as the main inspiration for a lot of the Enchanters’ techniques. She didn’t even know if Cullen _liked_ to argue, but there was no point arguing with Solas, when she already knew what his stance on the matter would be.

They set out for the place where the Chargers had camped, on the smugglers’ route they’d uncovered when they first passed through. Bull and his men had vowed to stake out the route and see if any further shipments could be hijacked, the red lyrium sent to the Underforge for Dagna to study.

Asha really, really hoped Bull hadn’t sent his men after that dragon, with her not here to act as impulse control.

In fact, the reality was far worse. The Chargers greeted her with sombre and slightly apprehensive faces when she rode into camp. The source of their wariness soon became clear: they'd caught another red lyrium red shipment three days before. And they’d also caught the three red templars transporting it, taking them as hostages.

“Boss,” Bull said without preamble, as he started escorting her to the cave where they had them held prisoner. “That thing you did when you saw those skulls in Redcliffe? I need you to… not do that here.”

“Um… ok?” Asha said, tentatively. “Are they like, crystal-y? Because I tend to find the crystal-y ones easier to deal with, to be honest.”

“It’s… not that exactly,” Bull said, “one of them… well… she was talking some fucked-up shit when she stopped being unconscious. Seems to think she knows you.”

“Ah,” Asha did not miss the startled and incredibly worried look Cassandra gave her, like she was worried she’d summon her spirit blade right there and then. There could only be one reason why templars claiming to know her would have everyone shaken: they were _her_ templars, then. “Well, fuck.”

“Yeah, that was kind of my reaction,” the Qunari muttered. “But she’s also real... fucking chatty. Reckon it’s the red stuff, or the withdrawal, or maybe she just likes running her mouth off. I think, right kind of audience? It’ll be a longer monologue than the last act of an Orlesian opera.”

“You’ve seen opera?” Asha joked weakly, using humour to deflect from the fact that she was about to come face to face with one of her tormentors.

Obviously, it didn’t fool a _Benn-Hassreth_ for one second. “I’m sorry to ask this of you, Boss. But trust me, these guys know a lot, and I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t kill them all before I had the chance to crack them for our beloved Nightingale.”

“And for your… people.”

“Yeah, them too.”

“Do you really think I’m going to kill them all?” Asha couldn’t help but feel a little offended. “I didn’t even kill Alexius, in the end.”

“You’re a force to be reckoned with, Boss. I like it when it’s on my side, but I’d rather not have to go against it.”

“Aww, it’s really sweet of you to think you wouldn’t take me down immediately.”

“Oh I would,” her friend said with a grin, “I’d just rather have you save the bloodlust for a time when we could both really use that energy.”

Weak jokes aside, Asha felt sick with nerves as she walked into the cave. At the back, past the abandoned fragments of previous smugglers’ camps and the glow of deep mushrooms, were three figures, bound and gagged with a severe looking Skinner as their guard. The elf looked up as she saw them approach, gave Asha a nod of acknowledgement before turning to her boss, “they’ve been chatty, this morning.”

“Yay. Lucky us.” Bull started manhandling the prisoner in question. He tossed her over one shoulder, and they walked back out into daylight, while the woman kicked her legs ineffectually.

Asha jumped nearly a mile when she felt Cass’ hand on her shoulder. It masqueraded as comfort, but she could feel the weight behind it - her friend was ready to restrain her, if it came to that. “Will you be able to recognise them?” the Seeker muttered to her, “like you did with Denam?”

“Fuck me if I know,” Asha replied, truthfully. “You probably have more of a chance than me.” She knew the faces of some very specific templars, but she didn’t know how many of them there’d even been when they’d taken the Clan. She certainly didn’t remember any women, but she didn’t know if that was because the entire thing had happened too quickly for her to discern gender, behind all the armour. She remembered the faces of those who’d held her down, and Denam earned a place in her memory because he had been a frightened, frenzied onlooker stood directly in front of her, watching as it happened and waiting for the moment she proved herself an abomination, just so he could strike her down.

Bull dumped the templar down and removed the sack over her head, and her cloth gag. The woman seemed halfway through her transition on red lyrium. Crimson smoke wafted off of her in waves, as it had with the people who’d been trapped in the basement of Redcliffe. She had dark brown hair, but the pallor of her skin was mushroom grey, and a pattern of inlaid, webbed red crystals scarred one cheek, looking almost like dragon scales.

Nothing about her face struck a chord of recognition in Asha’s chest, but the same could not be said for the templar. She looked up, with a half-wild gaze, and her squint became wide-eyed knowing, when she saw Asha’s face. “So it’s true, then.” she said, in a low, more guttural voice than seemed natural, looking at her anchor, and then back into her eyes, “it _is_ you. Not just our foe. Our reckoning.”

Asha didn’t quite know what to say to that. ‘Reckoning’ was a far grander title, even than ‘Herald’.

“This here,” said Bull, propping the woman up as she gave an incredulous grunt, “is Reagan.”

“I’d… say it was a pleasure… but…”

Reagan spat in her face. The spit didn’t quite reach her, but the action alone made Asha freeze up, blinking rapidly like she’d been punched, too stunned to even summon indignation. She remembered the templar in Haven who had done the same thing. Then, it had been insulting and infuriating. Here, now, it was… terrifying. Almost like she was thrown back to the ground in Clan Lavellan’s camp.

“It’s all your fault!” Reagan said, while Asha tried to fight the wave of dissociation. “I wouldn’t be here, be like this, if it wasn’t you!”

“Funny,” she said weakly, and she knew her voice had taken on a dangerous quality from the way both Bull and Cassandra tensed, “isn’t that my line?”

“How do you know the Herald? What did you do?” Cass took a menacing step forward, placing herself between Asha and the templar. Asha thought it was for her own protection, but she wasn’t quite sure.

As Bull had promised, it didn’t take much formal interrogation for words to flood incoherently from Reagan’s mouth. “It was supposed to be _over_. I almost got out of Kirkwall!” she raged. She strained against her bonds and her head thrashed, trails of crimson smoke pouring from her eyes and the cracks in her cheeks, “I was almost free!”

Asha just stood there, watching her. She couldn’t have spoken even if she wanted to. But it could be passed off as deliberate, as it quickly proved more efficient in getting information out of the woman than any question.

“All I needed was safe passage out of that blood bath,” the templar cried, “but then they found _you_. And Samson had his war crime -”

“Samson ordered the Clan Lavellan massacre?” Cassandra pounced on this almost immediately, at the very mention of the name.

“No, he had his _leverage!_ ” Reagan spat, “Something to hold over our heads. A shame to make us follow him. More proof of the Order’s corruption. A crime that deserved punishment. I… I didn’t even _do_ anything!”

“Oh,” said Asha softly.

“Now you see, Reagan, I’m pretty sure you did _something_ ,” Bull said.

“I was so _tired_ ,” she said. “We’d been fighting since Kirkwall - the nightmares… the lyrium was gone. All I wanted was sleep. I just wanted to rest. And then,” she narrowed her eyes as Asha, “ _you_. They found you. An abomination they said, masquerading as a god amongst your people, while your brethren slaughtered their way through Kirkwall and painted the cobblestones red -”

“Um-” More than anything, that was really not the way that Firsts worked. As she had when the Red Templars overtook Haven, Asha began to shelter in the trivialities.

“We told them what you were. We asked them to let us take you. It would have been bloodless. But they _refused_. And then we had to _fight_ , again,” Reagan said it bitterly, like the deaths of Clan Lavellan had been a duty forced upon her. “As if enough of us hadn’t died, as if we hadn’t wasted away to nothing. As if the cause mattered. As if it ever mattered.”

“Here’s a crazy idea!” Asha said shrilly, finally finding her voice, “if you felt that way, you could have... just not fought! You could’ve walked away! You could’ve tried to stop them!”

“I was sixteen!” Reagan shrieked back.

The clearing fell silent, at that. Reagan did not look like she’d been sixteen, two years ago. With her papery, discoloured skin, bruise-like pallor and array of lyrium scars, Asha would’ve guessed the woman was her age, or older.

“I needed protection, the things I’d seen… my training was not enough. My powers were gone. They told me if I stayed with them, if I fought, they'd get me lyrium, enough to make the journey home. I didn't even _do anything_. I hung back, I rounded up those that tried to escape. I only saw you - _you_ \- after. I just wanted there to be an _end_ ,” the templar was babbling now, “but there was no end. It was only the beginning. They wouldn’t let me go. They made me bear their guilt, as if their orders had not come from their own mouths. They said we’d all failed, though I’d done exactly what they wanted. They went to Samson. They told me if I left, they’d -”

Cassandra smacked her across the face. It felt like everyone involved was a little surprised to find that the Seeker was the first person to react violently. Though, Asha reflected, she’d definitely lunged at her when she’d been imprisoned in the Haven Chantry. 

“You are ceasing to be helpful,” the Seeker said to the templar, through tight lips.

“Who gave you the orders to kill my clan?” Asha asked, her voice ice cold and far away.

“We were saving your village from a scourge! They were the ones who chose to spend so many lives on one lousy mage.”

“Answer the question, Reagan,” Bull said, tersely.

“I won’t. I’m many things, these days, but no traitor. Not when that’s all I have left.” Reagan spat back.

“How… convenient,” Cassandra said, her voice steaming with fury. “A cause you’ve betrayed and desecrated, orders from leaders you admit you hate, and _now_ you take refuge in loyalty?”

“Why, am I going to pick _you_ , instead? When you’ll murder me as soon as the name is out of my mouth?”

“Oh, believe me, there are definitely other conditions under which I will murder you,” Asha said.

Reagan sneered at her. “Tell me, abomination, am I supposed to pity you? Feel sorry for what happened to you? If the rumours are to be believed, we remade you into Andraste’s vessel. An elven mage, lifted up above all others. Look at me. _Look at you_. How are you still standing? Unblemished. Unmarked. You should’ve _died_.”

“You’re the ones who chose Tranquility, not me. There are cleaner and far more permanent ways to kill a person,” Asha said, in a flat voice. “Who gave you the order?”

Reagan spat again. "My betters, and yours as well."

“When we caught you, you were travelling south,” said Bull, suddenly, when Asha opened her mouth to retort, “which means your shipment came from the north. Where? Emprise du Lion? Lydes? Jader?”

Asha glared at Bull. He was using Reagan’s reticence on one question to leverage another. One she didn’t much care about, in this moment.

But Reagan was now focused on her, rage simmering in her blood red gaze. “Do you feel special, abomination, now that you have people worshipping you? But no one wants a mage that isn’t _useful_. I bet your people were happy to be rid of you,” she said, “I bet they thanked us, afterwards.”

“Hard to be grateful, when you’re all dead,” Asha hissed back.

And then, the most awful thing happened. Reagan smiled. It was a little deranged, and her dry, chapped mouth cracked and weeped a liquid that wasn’t blood when she did it. But it was a smile, smug, satisfied, and predatory.

She turned to Bull, and said, in an unnervingly casual tone, “I picked the shipment up on the Imperial Highway. I don’t know where it came from.”

“Sure. I believe you,” Bull deadpanned.

“I can give you the names of other checkpoints on the route, if you want,” she continued, “and quarries. You need quarries, to mine lyrium.”

“I’m all ears, beautiful.”

At Bull’s cool, disinterested tone, Asha snapped, “Who gave you the order to murder my clan?”

“Why don’t you ask them, abomination?”

“I can't, because _you killed them all!_ ”

“Did we?” Reagan grinned again. Cass stepped into Asha’s way, clearly expecting her to lunge, or do something. Instead, she found herself frozen again, powerless. Her hands lay at her side, helpless.

“W-what?”

“I bet some of you people are still alive, you know? We didn’t get them all.”

“Oh, shut up,” Cassandra spat.

“What?” Reagan said innocently, “it’s true. I told you: I was asked to round up stragglers, but we’ve already established that I wasn’t very invested. I’m sure _some_ of them didn’t die.” Her eyes trained on Asha, watching the emotions play across her face with unsubtle satisfaction, “they just… didn’t want to look after _you_ , after. I bet those that survived were glad to be freed from the burden of pandering to a witch. I bet they left saw the hollow body we left, huddled in the dust, and thought, 'good riddance'. Do you even remember those first few days? Did you think all the bruises were from us?”

“Well, that’s just bullshit,” Cassandra said, disgusted. But Bull was watching Asha warily, because he knew Reagan had hit on something that hurt more than any other insult or indignity the templars had made her bear.

“Have you even looked for them, abomination?” Reagan asked.

“No,” Asha said, through numb lips, “they’re dead.”

“I suppose that’s easier than knowing they didn’t want to look after you. That they didn’t care.”

“It’s called the Clan Lavellan _massacre_ ,” Asha whispered. “There were no survivors.”

“And yet, here you stand,” Reagan grinned again, “why would they want to be saddled with a walking corpse, that brought them nothing but pain even when it was conscious? You were a liability. Before and after the Rite. All mages are.”

This time, Asha did lunge. Valour was suddenly in her hand, light flaring up around her. Bull had seen it coming, but despite his initial warnings not to lose her temper, he didn’t move to intervene. Cass tried to, but after months of sparring, Asha at least knew how to dodge, and ducked easily under her arm.

Two steps closed the distance. She slammed Valour into the red templar’s chest.

Reagan shrieked in pain.

She shrieked so loud, and for so long, that it took Asha a few moments to realise it was from the way Valour simmered and sparked against her armour when it pierced all the way through. When she withdraw the blade from Reagan's chest, there was no blood. Reagan continued screaming.

Valour had apparently deemed this woman not her enemy - or perhaps decided that it was not in Asha’s best interests to kill her.

“Huh,” Bull said, which kind of summed up Asha’s feelings on the matter.

“Did you know that would happen?!” Asha demanded of him.

“The jury was really out on that one.” he replied, putting a boot on Reagan's chest and pushing her over, “honestly, we have two more prisoners. There were workarounds, regardless of which side of the coin it landed.”

“You bitch!” Reagan shrieked, lunging forward while Bull pressed her down into the dirt. “You can’t even kill me?! End this. End this now! Punish me! Make it _stop!_ ”

“Ahh,” Asha said, glancing down at the hilt in her hand. So, the templar had been deliberately provoking a reaction out of her. “How does withdrawal feel, when you’ve been taking _red_ lyrium, Reagan?”

“All you mages are all the same!” Reagan cried, as if she hadn't even heard her, “you sow trouble wherever you step. You didn’t even _know_ me, and look what you’ve done to me! Why must we all suffer for the sake of _your_ existence? We kill those who murder innocents. We put down diseased beasts that poison the herd! We kill a dragon, when it burns down a village!”

“Shockingly, the last person I know who used a dragon to burn down a village was actually your master, Corypheus. No village burnings in my history, by comparison,” Asha remarked. Her voice was still shaky, but was regaining stable ground. Reagan’s words had been lies designed to trigger a killing blow. It made her feel so much calmer. She stepped back. “Do you think I’ve served my purpose, Bull?”

“You can stab her again, if it’ll make you feel better,” he told her, pragmatically.

Asha shrugged, and tried it again, just to check if the first time round had been a fluke. Reagan groaned at the pain as the spirit blade heated her armour, but once again it came out clean, leaving no wound on her torso.

“Seems she still has use to you,” she told her friend. “Can I place this matter in your very capable hands?”

“Think I’ve now got a handle on what makes her tick,” the _Benn-Hassreth_ replied calmly, as the woman ranted and railed and demanded death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooft, I hope this chapter wasn't too rough! As I was writing it, I was like, "why do I have to leave all the exposition in the hands of bad, bad people?" 
> 
> I would much rather dedicate my chapters to Cullen and Asha debating magical academia instead xD None of my lore on Knight Enchanters is legit, btw, I just fucking love magic swords.
> 
> Hope everyone is enjoying themselves. I'm starting to despair at my wordcount again - I'm fully committed to a slowburn of epic lengths, but seriously, this is getting embarassing(!) So I hope wading through it all is still a good time for everyone involved :) xx 
> 
> Next week, we make it to Adamant!


	45. Chapter Forty-Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha prepares for the battle at Adamant.

Things moved very quickly, once they returned to Skyhold. 

Bull and Asha passed their information onto Leliana and Cullen. In the flurry of activity that followed, Asha never actually found out what intelligence the _Benn Hassreth_ had managed to pry from Reagan. All too soon, the Inquisition’s army was mobilised, and they began their march on Adamant. Asha got three nights of sleep in an actual bed before they were on the road again, retreading their steps but with some squiggly variations to negotiate the issues of getting an army through Orlais, when you weren’t _entirely_ sure it was allowed to be there. Orlais had already agreed to an Inquisition presence within its borders due to its close ties with the Chantry, but things got a little bit iffy when you started to amassing all that presence in one place. Josephine stayed behind in Skyhold, and requisitioned half of Leliana’s ravens, to continue the negotiations as the army set out. Apparently their safe, unmolested passage through the region involved “a lot of promises that we better pray we can keep.” It seemed that, when you offered to tackle a demon army essentially free of charge, the nobility became more willing to let you through their land - although the Inquisition gave the Dales a wide berth, just in case.

Asha had never travelled as part of an army before. Now she was essentially leading one. She, Cass, and Cullen sat at the forefront of the legion, Hawke and the rest of the party trailing behind. Still, nothing much seemed to change, if you ignored the presence of hundreds of people looming behind you, placing their life in your hands. She still chatted shit while leading Buttons at a sedate pace through the countryside - only now it was mostly about military strategy, as Cullen gave her a haphazard crash course, after indulging her in a good half-day rant about certain books on Knight Enchantment. She still trained with Cassandra and Commander Helaine daily, though it now took place at nightfall once they'd finished their day of travel. She even sparred once with Hawke, for all of thirty seconds before the Champion took her down spectacularly (they were both a little tipsy at the time). She still pitched her own little tent and took watches at night, though there were now parameter patrols to keep her company. She could kid herself that everything was… almost normal.

It was this month-long exercise in wilful denial that meant that, when she found herself one valley away from Adamant and faced the fact they’d be laying siege to the fortress the next morning, Asha's adrenaline hit her like a ten tonne brick to the stomach.

Their last meeting to discuss the plans for the siege ended just before midnight. Cullen and Cassandra were now walking amongst the troops, explaining the plan of action to the commanders and captains, but Asha's grasp of military terminology was… sketchy at best, confusing at worst. Now all she had to focus on was the route they planned for her to take, the maps of Adamant burned on her brain. She was expected to infiltrate and get as many Grey Wardens on-side as possible, using her Heraldic bullshit. The forces at Adamant were estimated at over a thousand, but way less than half of that number were mages. If she managed to turn the enemy troops without magic against those using them as demon fodder, leveraging her divinity, their tiny army would double in size and might not get absolutely slaughtered.

When their meeting adjourned, she’d felt the urge to do something with the military advisers in that tent. Hug them? Thank them? Say goodbye? But that was stupid, because she’d see them all tomorrow morning, when they made their final march.

What did people even _do_ , the night before a battle? Bull and the Chargers’ answer seemed to be ‘get shitfaced while singing songs', including a few dirty sea shanties Hawke had taught them from her time on her wife’s ship, but Asha didn’t want to join them. She’d been drunk at the start of the fight for Haven, and it wasn't an experience she desperately wanted to repeat. Sera was uncharacteristically quiet, crafting arrows with methodical precision until her own quiver was full to bursting and she started passing them around to Inquisition scouts like party favours. Asha caught glimpses of Cole flitting around camp. She knew the spirit would be calming the fears and worries of individual Inquisition soldiers, and that it would be utterly selfish to ask him to stick by her side for the rest of the evening.

In the end, she settled for strolling a little ways out of the camp, shivering with the cold. With nothing else to do, she summoned her spirit blade and practised some of the patterns Helaine had taught her, hoping it would get rid of the excess energy that came with fear. Without her armour, she moved fluidly and with minimal effort, more like she was dancing, as her feet trailed along the sand with a bare whisper. The blade carved golden arcs in the night air, searing her vision and leaving imprints when she blinked. 

While they’d trained over the course of this journey, Helaine had given Asha lectures to rival Deshanna’s: on what it meant to lead with certainty, to have a rank, and a place, and to see people’s lives merely as numbers in a sum, when such blinkered vision became necessary. Deshanna would never have approved of any of what the woman said, but after the pains of Redcliffe and Haven, Asha found that she’d begun to appreciate their clinical discussions and the way it anaesthetised her utter panic to a dull, churning unease. She’d never willingly walked into a battle before, not like this, and the anticipation was killing her. Fear made her feel restless and reckless in turns. 

An indeterminable amount of time later, the spirit blade enchantment finally fluctuated and broke, having drained her mana totally dry. Asha came to a halt, chest heaving with exertion, hands falling uselessly to her sides. When she turned to head back into camp, she saw a figure standing a few feet behind her and nearly jumped out of her fucking skin.

“Mythal’s _fucking_ tits - Solas!” she cried, putting her hand to her chest. 

“My apologies,” he said quietly, stepping in closer so the light of the anchor illuminated him a little more. He looked tired, and she probably did to, the harsh planes of his face exaggerated by the play of shadow. Although they all covered up as best they could, every Inquisition soldier was now miserable, sunburnt, and covered in a layer of beige dust just as a matter of course, since entering the Western Approach. Solas even had a few freckles across his cheeks, which Asha had to admit was kind of adorable. 

Suddenly, he seemed to take in what she'd said, and quirked an eyebrow, “Mythal’s… tits?”

“Yeah, so, it seems Sera’s been rubbing off on me,” she admitted.

Facing him now, she realised that she hadn’t actually… talked to Solas much. It hadn’t even been a product of deliberate avoidance, really. When they’d travelled to the Western Approach the first time, she’d fought not to think about him, but this time round there’d just been _so much else_ to think about. She’d been taking on hunting missions to keep their army fed, scouting out territories and closing any rifts that she found on the way to ensure they passed through safely, and when she was riding with the main body of the army she’d often found herself grilling Cullen on military strategy, and Cassandra and Commander Helaine on technique. She felt like she was desperately trying to catch up - as if she was studying for some kind of test, only this time people would die if and when she failed. 

It wasn’t like she’d deliberately shut him out - she’d still asked him several of the questions that had boiled up inside her from travelling through the Emerald Graves, and she shared dinners with him and other Inquisition members around their campfires. It was just, well, they were walking towards a war, and suddenly a failed romance was far from her top priority.

Of course, the knowledge that they could all die tomorrow had done a little to shift everyone's stances on that particular matter. Quite a few people were taking comfort where they could find it. Three days ago when on watch, she’d seen Dorian sneaking into Bull’s tent. It was an act of discretion that the noises they started making roughly fifteen minutes later utterly squandered. Asha didn’t know what it said about her, that the same energy that drove people into each other’s beds led her out into the middle of nowhere to practice _magic sword fighting_.

“Did you, um, want something?” she asked lamely, fastening her hilt back onto her belt.

“I wanted to speak to you, before…”

 _Before we all risk our lives again._ “About anything specific?” she asked. It came out a little brusque, and she bit her lip, “sorry, that was harsh. I’m kind of on edge. Do you want to… walk?”

He nodded silently, and then started walked in a wide circle that roughly arced in the direction of camp. “You seem to have become proficient with your blade,” he remarked, which was the Solas version of nervous small talk.

She smiled, “it helps that Valour is correcting me as I go. Half the work is on them, honestly. I’m glad they’re a willing participant in all this, otherwise it would definitely feel like I was taking all their glory. Which literally seems like quite bad practice, with a spirit of valour in particular.”

Solas stilled slightly, watching her with that hawkish gaze that drilled all the way through her. “You… how do you know that? That it's willing?”

“Anders checked in on them for me, as a favour. He asked Justice, who asked the spirit in the blade.” Asha shrugged, “I was feeling all weird about it and wanted consent, I guess.”

“You... asked your spirit blade for consent?”

“Well, I know they said Valour was valour, but if they were lying? What if they were a spirit of compassion, like Cole, or something?” Asha said, shuddering, “and I was making them hurt things against their will? Or gods, what if my Valour spirit was just tired and they didn’t feel like fighting anymore? What if they just wanted rest? I didn’t want to be trapping something here just for my sake.”

“That’s… kind,” he said, quietly and thoughtfully. “Few people would even think to do such a thing.”

“Yes, moral superiority is always great when it works out in my favour,” she said, with an affectionate smile down at the hilt on her hip. “Justice asked, and turns out Valour’s on my side. It’s nice to have someone who will always be in my corner -”

“What were you like, before the anchor?”

The question came out of nowhere, cutting her off in the middle of her sentence about how Justice had said that Valour was basically a mabari. Typical! The one story she had about adventures with spirits in the Fade, and Solas cut it short.

But the question somehow seemed important to him - his eyes were trained on her face, drinking in her expression. Asha frowned at his intensity, “um… I was tranquil? You know this.”

“No. I mean, compared to before. What were you like, amongst your people? Has the anchor affected you? Changed you in any way? Your mind, your morals, your… spirit?”

Asha snorted, “gods Solas, you’d know more about that than I would. You’re the Fade expert.”

“Please, _lethallan_ , humour me.” 

Asha considered, looking across the quiet camp that buzzed with tense energy, on the threshold of the war about to break. She sighed, “I know I’ve changed. I wouldn’t be _here_ , I don’t think, if I hadn’t. But I really don't think that’s because of the anchor. It’s all the… other stuff. The templars, and the tranquillity. The core of me hasn’t changed. I know I’m angrier, and fiercer. But that's probably because I never really knew fear amongst my clan, and now I do. Because the only thing I have to take care of now is me. So I’ve got nothing to lose by being brutal about it.”

“You are one of the least brutal people I know,” he murmured.

“Hey! Just because the last time I stabbed a templar didn't take!” her expression sobered, "and I'd never have lead my clan in battle, before."

Solas gave her a small smile, “my apologies. I am clearly mistaken. You are truly a formidable woman.”

“And don't you forgot it!” Asha turned to him, curious, "why does it matter what I was like before the anchor?"

“The connection to the Fade… I wondered...”

“...If it makes me more sympathetic to spirits? Why? Because I’m being nice to Valour? If I care more about the welfare of spirits now, Solas, that’s not the mark, that’s _you_ \- you and Anders, I guess.” Asha smirked, thinking _you idiot_. Of course Solas would try to use the Fade to explain things that were simply in people’s nature. “The anchor is just a thing! If being directly connected to the Fade changed people, then no one would come out of a Harrowing alive! Everyone would just assume they were possessed.” She let out a huff of frustrated breath, “The reason you love the Fade is because of your experiences there, right? It’s the same for me. What I’ve lived through and what I’ve done, who I’ve met and talked to and what they’ve taught me - that’s changed me more than a stupid glowy hand. If it weren’t for the tranquillity thing, of course. And that's a pretty exceptional variable to account for.”

She realised she’d been talking for a long time, and fell into awkward silence, biting her lip. They were almost back to the camp, and she didn’t know what she’d do when she got there. “Is this _really_ what you wanted to talk about?” she asked. “Not like, military strategy, or the battle plan, or something? You don’t have a magic Fade thing hidden up your sleeve that means all the demons at Adamant die?”

“No… I’m afraid that’s not currently in my power,” Solas let out a long breath that sounded almost regretful. “Mostly I just… wanted to hear you talk.”

“Oh.” Asha was surprised that the ache in her chest, the one that had been there a month ago, was much duller than before. Instead, there was mostly just guilt: she felt bad that he had to say such a simple thing, the night before they might all die. “I’m sorry, Solas. I swear I’ve not been avoiding you. I mean, I was at one point, I guess. But the last few weeks I’ve been…”

“You’re a leader now, _lethallan_. I do not expect to be entitled to your time.”

“You see, that’s the thing! I’m not a leader, not really, not yet. I’ve been taking _lessons_ , in Common, and swordfighting. That’s not _leading_. Tomorrow is the first proper time, and if I fail everyone will die.” she shuddered, hugging her arms as if fighting off a chill. “Creators, I’m so fucking scared.”

At her sharp intake of breath, Solas put his hand on her arm to turn her towards him, and before she knew what she was doing, she was hugging him, rather than herself, hands fisted in his shirt and face buried in his shoulder. 

Asha took three, shaking breaths, and then he gently, hesitantly, patted her back. All the tension melted from her, and she shut her eyes and let out a long sigh. As she leant all her weight into him, she idly wondered what would happen, if she tried to kiss him again. If anything came of it, it would be desperate, and she’d spend every moment doubting whether or not he was returning the affection out of genuine feeling, or pity. Or he’d reject her, _again_ , and she’d be left cursing her foolishness, and spend a sleepless night overthinking it, when there were so many better reasons she could be getting a sleepless night. 

Either way, it would ruin whatever was happening right now.

“Gods, sorry,” she said, stepping back hastily out of the circle of his arms and scrubbing at her face.

“Don’t apologise -”

“Oh, not about the hug!” she said, “ the hug was grand! It’s just - I think I’ve been a bad friend. You shouldn’t have to ask for me to _talk_ to you, Solas. I’m really sorry if it seems like I’ve been avoiding you. I guess I made a mistake and things got awkward-”

“Asha-”

“You’re the first person I trusted here, you know?” she told him, “you didn’t expect me to be the Herald of Andraste, or the leader of a new mage revival, or anything. You helped me settle here. You’re my closest friend and I’ve ruined it, made it about something it isn’t…”

“You haven’t ruined anything,” he told her solemnly, “I’m not angry, nor hurt. There are mistakes on my side too, far too many for counting. I didn’t want to - before we face the demon hoard beyond the walls of Adamant...”

He trailed off, weirdly uncertain Asha waited several moments for him to speak again before her nervousness got the better of her. “What is it?”

“I-” Solas swallowed, and looked away, “I think you will make an excellent leader, _lethallan_... if you truly think you are not one already.”

“Oh.” Asha didn’t know whether or not to be disappointed. She didn’t know if it was just wishful thinking, but she didn’t think that was what he had really wanted to say. She took his hands in hers and squeezed them, “thank you, Solas. You’re a good friend and your opinions means a lot to me - there’s no one I trust more than you. And if we make it to the other side of this… well…” she gave him a weak smile, “I have some _really strong opinions_ about Knight Enchantment that I need to discuss with you.”

In another life, there would’ve been an Asha Lavellan who thought ‘fuck it’, threw caution to the wind, and dragged him back to her tent. Or dragged _someone else_ to her tent, just to erase every worry and care from her mind. Unfortunately, the current Asha Lavellan didn’t find gut-wrenching fear to be much of an aphrodisiac, so she left Solas and kept on trudging back through the camp, wondering if exhaustion would finally claim her. 

Her tent was close to the one used for their meetings - one of the perks of being Inquisitor, she supposed. As she walked up to it, she saw that the interior was still illuminated by candlelight. For a second she was worried she’d missed some important midnight meeting - or was it later than that now? She honestly couldn’t tell - until she realised there was only one figure silhouetted in the glow.

It offered another distraction from the nausea, so she went up to the entrance and peeked in. As she'd expected, she saw Cullen there, pouring over documents still, with a canteen of something lukewarm in his hand. He was in his shirtsleeves, and looked tired. He too was covered in the habitual layer of Western Approach dust, with a particularly orange mark on his forehead from where he must’ve kept brushing his hair out of his face. It had grown out while they were on campaign, and he also hadn't shaved in several days. All of which, you know... worked for him, if she was honest. She could maybe do without the dust.

“Is there anything you need help with?” she asked, hoping she didn’t sound too desperate for an excuse not to attempt sleep.

Cullen looked up, a little dazed and obviously surprised to see her. While they were on pretty friendly terms these days - at least, he suffered through her constant questions with good humour - they weren’t exactly close. “Oh, no, Asha,” he sighed and straightened, rubbing the orange forehead mark again, “it’s… I’m not really doing anything useful, at this point. It’s all just… I can’t sleep.”

“Yeah, no, me neither. You sure you don’t want those papers… alphabetised, or something?”

“You can’t _read_.”

“I’ll have you know that I’ve progressed far enough in my studies to at least know the alphabet,” she responded primly, walking into the tent. “Is the drink alcoholic, at least?”

Cullen sighed, looking down into the cup. “Elfroot tea,” he admitted reluctantly. “I have a headache.”

“Damn,” she muttered- she’d been hoping to get a sip but elfroot tasted awful, as un-Dalish as it was to admit. “Is it from the daytime heat, or something? Because I think I might have a spell that-” 

“No,” Cullen cut her off, “it’s nothing that sleep won’t cure, if I ever manage it. It’s one of the side effects of, well, you know…"

“Oh. _Oh_.”

“Insomnia is pretty much part of the course, at the moment, and that’s when there isn’t a war on.”

“Well, shit. Is there anything I can do?”

“Not really. It’s not something someone else can fix. It’s particularly bad at the moment.”

“Because you’re scared we’ll fuck up.” _That I’ll fuck up,_ Asha thought, but she knew it would be bad form to make this about her.

“No. I mean yes. But really it’s just that… I… I don’t do well, with demons,” he admitted, and Asha watched him blink at himself in surprise, as if he hadn’t planned on admitting such a thing.

“I don’t think anyone does, Commander,” she pointed out. She was confused: they’d been fighting demons from day one, and it never seemed a problem for him before.

“I don’t do well with demons on the kind of scale we’re likely to be dealing with tomorrow,” he qualified.

“I mean, also, perfectly natural. One demon, bad. Lots and lots of demons, definitely worse. Any reason in particular? Other than the murder, and the possession, and the -”

“Yes,” he cut her off, “I get your drift, Inquisitor.” He sighed, “it’s… the fact that the demons are dividing an army, causing a force to turn their blades against their own men because that's what they believe it’s right. That is what I am struggling with. Specifically.”

“Because it’s… dishonourable?”

“Because it’s familiar,” he responded quietly, which was certainly not the answer she’d been expecting. He winced at his own words then fell quiet, looking anywhere but at her.

“Oh,” said Asha, wishing she had something more intelligent to say. When he stayed resolutely silent and she realised it was still on her to respond, she continued, “we don’t have to talk about that, if you don’t want to?”

“I’d really rather not.” Cullen rubbed the back of his neck, “maybe when this is over and done with, but not right now.”

“But... I might have a solution to helping you get some sleep, I think.”

He looked up at her, “really?”

“It would involve doing a spell on you, if you don’t… mind that?” 

“It would rather depend on the spell.”

“In this case, I’m not sure it would. Well, yes for _you_ it would, you probably don’t want me to fire mine your tent but I mean - for it to work. For you to get some rest. I’ve been thinking about… lyrium addiction,” she looked down at her hands, “you said that templars use lyrium to substitute a connection to the Fade that you don’t have, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Well what if I connect you to the Fade? With a lasting magical effect?” she asked. “I leave something on you for a while - that’s pretty much as close to the Fade as you can get without having your own magic. It might be like a… stop gap? A weak one.” She sighed, “but I would be using tranquil aura on you anyway, which might actually be enough in and of itself. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I honestly have no fucking clue what magic is, never mind what lyrium is, that it works as a substitute for the godsdamned _Fade_.”

“You’ve been thinking of ways to help me? With lyrium addiction?”

“Well, seeing as apparently no one else in Thedas gives a shit…” she grumbled, absentmindedly emptying the new boatload of sand out of her breeches pockets and onto the tent floor. When she looked up midway through the process, she saw that Cullen was watching her with an unreadable expression. Fair enough - probably not the task to be performing when discussing a colleague’s health. 

“If you don’t want to try it the night before a battle, I’d understand that,” she said. “But it might help one of us get some sleep tonight, at least.”

“Why not? Let's give it a try. I… what do I have to do?”

“Just stand there and look pretty,” she joked, and then froze. Because Cullen Rutherford was _always_ pretty, and it didn’t much count as a joke when everyone in the world was completely aware of it. True to form, the Commander also froze up, and began to blush under his lovely, newly acquired suntan. “It’s uh… a passive effect,” she clarified, recovering for both their sakes as she took a few steps closer, “I just cast it, then we go our separate ways and let it degrade.”

She stepped so he was within arm’s reach - but then, he’d already been in arm's reach, this tent wasn’t exactly huge. Now she was just close. She raised her hand, and put it in on his shoulder, feeling the truly impressive swell of muscle and the heat radiate from under his shirt. She wondered if her hands were sweaty. The movement felt clunky and ludicrous in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on - she didn’t get why she suddenly cared so much about how exactly you were supposed to hold someone’s arm.

“Are you sure?” she asked, just for something to fill the frankly abhorrent silence.

“Why not, Inquisitor? Go ahead,” Cullen said, his eyes resolutely pinned to the canvas behind her head. A habit he struggled to break, apparently - looking anywhere but at her.

She closed her eyes and pulled up enough mana for the spell with relative ease. A few seconds later, everything snapped into place, and then the aura began to well up and crash out of her. “You might feel a little strange for a second,” she told him, eyes stil closed, because she wanted to make sure it didn’t catch him unawares like it had when Solas had attempted doing it to her. “Everything might become a little muted…”

She heard a big, heavy, bone-weary sigh, like Cullen had taken the last - well, when had he become so serious? Adolescence? Early childhood? - decade or so of tension and let go of it all at once. Damn. She had some very good reasons to never use this spell on herself, but then she liked to think she wasn’t quite as highly strung as the Commander. She opened her eyes and saw that, although very little about Cullen had visibly changed, the tension had begun to leak from his body, shoulders slumping. His frown lines were once again smoothing out. Without thinking, she reached out with the hem of her sleeve and wiped away the particularly dark patch of dust - it had been bothering her the entire time.

“Ok, Commander, where’s your tent?” she asked. When Cullen just slow-blinked at her, golden-eyed and dazed, she qualified, “Not in a sexy way, I just realised that I kind of triggered this without really thinking about logistics.”

He placidly lead her to where he was sleeping, and Asha tried not to feel incredibly uncomfortable about the whole thing. Cullen didn’t look like he was tranquil - he still nodded to the patrols that passed them, and answered questions easily when Captain Rylen stopped him and basically stared at Asha’s hand on his arm the entire time, eyebrows raised. But it was obvious that the spell had taken effect with all the subtlety of strong liquor, if only because Rylen’s silent and rather pointed surprise didn’t make the Commander blush.

When they finally stopped, Asha dropped her hold as quickly as possible. As she turned to go, she felt his hand on her arm - not with any force behind it, just a pinch of her shirtsleeve between his thumb and forefinger, like a child trying to get an adult's attention. “What happened in Haven,” he told her, his voice soft and already a little drowsy, “I will not let it happen again. You have my word.”

She didn’t know quite what he meant. The deaths? The dragon? The templars? There were no templars involved this time!

“Go get some sleep,” she chided, pushing him towards his tent. As he nodded and bent down to enter his tent, she silently prayed that the aura would degrade in its standard two hours... unless they wanted a groggy, stoned Cullen Rutherford leading them into battle.

Asha made a point of walking past Rylen on the way back. Alone. 

Just so that no one got the wrong idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A chonky chapter. I'm not going to lie, I got bored of waiting for Adamant to happen, and so decided to cover a lot of ground in one go.
> 
> I'd also completely forgot some sections of this chapter, so editing it now was an... interesting experience(!) This was the last chapter in one section of the WIP in gdocs, which I haven't revisited in a while. I *totally* don't have to redraft an entire later scene with Solas, in light of what past-me had already written. Nope. Not me. I can write. I can do words. And short-term memory, apparently.
> 
> No author's notes, except that to say I'm not quite sure the tranquil aura/fade connection thing ACTUALLY makes any kind of logical sense. I just wanted to give Asha an excuse to touch Cullen's bicep ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
> 
> I hope people enjoy this chapter! Love me some Sad Bastard Pining Hours, so expect more of this tone in future :') Tomorrow, Adamant! xxx


	46. Chapter Forty-Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here Lies the Abyss, part 1.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: violence

So, Adamant.

The fortress was ugly and austere, sitting pale and smooth in the valley like a fat bloated worm, and it was currently vomiting demons at them.

Asha was in the vanguard. Asha had never been in the vanguard before, without making the decision off-hand. Spells and arrows rained down from behind her, from the line of ranged defence where she would normally stand. She was the only mage in the party that would break and make a bid to seek out Clarel: Dorian had tried to look regretful when he’d received that news and not succeeded, while Solas’ expression had been stormy yet resigned. Vivienne, as a Knight Enchanter, was leading her own charge on the northern ramparts.

In practice, being in the vanguard didn’t feel that much different. Cassandra on one side, Sidonie on the other, the Champion yelling expletives with every hit. She was still barriering everyone she could see in range, flinging the spells out desperately, and placing firemines in the path of the oncoming hordes to clear a path towards the doors for the battering ram. All that had really changed was the need to keep reminding herself to keep a good distance between herself and Bull, for fear that he’d accidentally decapitate her. And now she had Valour, arcing its way through the flesh of demons with a fury that didn't match the strange resonance it had when it sang through the air.

Her mage staff was new as well - a lightweight counterpart to the blade, commissioned specially for Knight Enchanters. It was strong, but hollow like the bones of a bird so that it could be wielded one-handedly. When she released an energy barrage, the glyph flared in front of her face, blowing strands of her hair back, and a flurry of blistering cold raced away from her.

“Arrows! They’re readying another volley!” shouted Cullen from behind her.

“On it!” Asha yelled back, training her eyes on the ramparts above. She held her breath, counting down. At the last possible second, when she saw the bolts curving down towards them, she cast a disruption field that raced up above her group to meet the projectiles like a cresting wave, causing their momentum to falter and sending them clattering harmlessly to the ground.

She had only a moment to feel smug about how _useful_ she was becoming when three more demons attacked from her right. None of the wardens dare leave the fortress’ walls, but they were happy to let their brand new friends try to thin out the Inquisition’s numbers. After carving through two of them, her spirit blade sputtered and died. Asha didn’t even have the time to curse, retreating a few steps and trying to summon a winter’s grasp for the third. Suddenly there was a howling in the air and the remaining demon was slammed into the ground with a veilstrike, screeching in pain. Another strike pummelled it, till it became paste then became smoke. Asha huffed a breath, waved a hand behind her head in an acknowledgement, and then began flinging firemines again. She only knew one rift mage, and she didn’t have the time to look behind her and see from what distance Solas was watching her back. 

She was running low on mana, but she’d refused to strap any lyrium potions to her belt. She’d refused health potions until the healers on duty could detail all of the ingredients for her.

They were close now, hugging the walls as the soldiers positioned the siege equipment. She kept her eyes trained on the battlements above, and saw they were readying boulders to drop on them all. “How long have we got, Commander?” she yelled to Cullen. The rocks were too heavy to stop with a disruption field. 

“It rather depends on the door, Inquisitor!” he threw back tersely, stepping out and into the fray. “Fan out, keep the demons off them while they work!”

“ _Fenedhis_ ,” she muttered. “Here goes nothing.”

The wardens let go of the boulders and they hurtled to the earth. Asha held up her anchor, _pulled_ , and then a howling rift gaped open in the air just above their party. The first volley disappeared into the void and no doubt made for some very unhappy or very smushed Fade dwellers on the other side. Under the rift's protection, the Inquisition soldiers focused on getting the door down.

“Asha!” Cullen shouted from her right, and she span to see a terror demon almost upon her, moving lethargically as the Fade leeched at its form.

But Asha was nowhere near as helpless as the last time the two of them fought together. She ducked under the demon’s pincers as it lunged and summoned Valour again, aiming the sword directly for its chest. The newest perk of spirit blades? Chitinous armour meant absolutely nothing. Her blade plunged through the demon’s plates like butter, and simmered as she pulled it downwards through its side. It was already disintegrating when she looked to her elbow and saw that Cullen had rushed to her aid, clearly expecting her to be in more trouble than she was.

“See, I stabbed, and then I _cleaved_ ,” she said, as she raised her voice above the din with teasing emphasis.

“Inquisitor, is now _really_ the time?”

He made a fair point. Asha stalled him with a hand on his shoulder, long enough to drop a barrier over the both of them, and then they broke away from each other to cut into another wave of demons.

She didn’t have many of those rifts in her - not without weakening the veil and likely letting _more_ demons through. The next volley of boulders fell on their group with no impediment. There were thuds of flesh and cries cut short, and Asha simply had to harden her heart to them as she kept moving and kept cutting down demons, until the doors finally splintered open.

“Move!” Hawke bellowed, and the army rushed forward. Asha scrambled through the buckled doors and immediately into the next fray, her heart hammering in her chest. A Grey Warden charged at her, screaming, and she barely had time to summon her spirit blade to parry his own sword with a flurry of sparks. This time, she was certain Valour saved her life, moving her wrist in a way that threw the warrior off and caused him to stumble forward as she sidestepped. As he tried to fight the momentum, she instinctively took advantage of his moment of distraction and plunged her sword through his back. And so marked her first human casualty in the battle for Adamant.

There were too many demons to dwell on it for long. She was one of the first people through, which made her an easy target. She threw up another barrier at the bottleneck by the doors to give the soldiers a fighting chance and charged forward, scattering fire mines in her wake. She saw Bull flash her a wild, bloodthirsty grin before his blade cleaved a mage in two, while Cassandra tackled someone to the ground, and Sidonie yelled from a balcony where she was fully encircled by shades, “it’s like being back in _fucking_ Kirkwall!”

 _Kirkwall_. Maybe that was why Cullen had been on edge about this battle last night. She glanced back to see the Commander had also pushed through into the courtyard, the glint of her recent barrier on his skin as he faced down a mage who was ensconced in an alcove with a book open in their lap, and the four demons they’d summoned as protection. He seemed to be having no problems. Asha hadn’t actually seen him fight that often - her practice clashed with the ones he ran with troops. It was a sight to behold: he moved with fluid speed and strength, carving through all four demons demons with a frighteningly… _efficient_ number of strokes with his sword. Then, he charged for the mage. But he was too slow - with a whorl of dark energy, the mage’s image fluttered, and they teleported away before he could reach them.

Asha blinked, trying to follow the ribbon-like trajectory of the fade-step, before the enemy emerged just below the ledge where she was currently standing. Another few words of guttural language, and she saw them summon three more demons by the entrance, blocking more soldiers from getting through. The warden mage seemingly hadn’t seen her, but when the Commander glanced around and sighted them again, she saw from his gaze that he’d noticed her position. Asha began building up another barrage of cold energy within her, the glyph starting to form in the air between them. She hoped that would be enough to communicate her strategy - a quick shared look and a nod as Cullen advanced forward, and she released the tidal wave of magic on the mage, stopping their voice halfway through another spell. The ice crystallised, holding them fast, and Cullen leapt forward, cutting through the brittle flesh. The demons at the entrance, no longer anchored, disappeared as the mage fell, and another wave of Inquisition soldiers flooded into the courtyard.

Another nod of acknowledgement between them, and they separated again. Asha rushed to help Hawke with her shade problem while Cullen went to Cassandra’s aid.

“Fuck me, I miss retirement,” Sidonie grunted, pulling a chunk of demon out of her hair with a grimace once their fight was over. Asha murmured a non-committal agreement as she glanced across the courtyard: it was almost cleared of enemies now, bodies strewn across the dirt. Bull and Blackwall were finishing the last few shades, Cass was dusting herself down, and Cullen was walking back to talk with his lieutenants at the gates.

Suddenly, there was a whistling sound overhead, and Asha looked up to see a burning missile from one of their own trebuchets arc through the air, leaving a smoking trail like a comet. With a crash, it collided with one of the buildings above the courtyard. The battlements fractured and exploded with the impact, massive hunks of stonework raining down, about to hit -

“Cullen!” she cried out in warning, and the next step she took was a fade-step, for it was the only way she’d make it in time. Chill hit her skin as the world around her howled, and then she was next to him in the same breath, grabbing his plated arm and _pulling_ with a desperate tug, blinking out again and rendering them both incorporeal just in time to avoid the debris.

It would only occur to her later how dangerous that move was, given that he’d probably never fade-stepped before, and he had just been fighting a mage who used the exact same spell against him. There was every likelihood he might have resisted, had he not trusted her. But when they manifested a few feet away, stumbling forward and almost overbalancing, she just let out a whoop of relief. She glanced behind to see a chunk of brickwork twice her size embedded in the dirt where the Commander had stood just a second before, surrounded by a puff of dust. “Oh, fuck!” she said, with sincerity, her hand still on Cullen’s arm. His plate mail was cold to the touch now, even from that brief moment in the Fade.

Cullen stayed stock still for a second, staring at her and her hand on his arm, and then he too let out a long whoosh of breath, halfway between a whistle and relieved sigh, the other hand coming to his chest. He glanced over at the fractured stonework, and she could tell he was thinking the same thing as she was:

“Did I just save your life?” she crowed, grinning smugly at the momentary victory as she imagined one of his long-suffering looks, hidden by the shadows cast by his helmet, “I just stopped you getting smushed! Fuck yes! Who’s a liability now!?”

“Asha…” he sighed, and his voice was weary, rather than shaken, or even thankful, despite his recent brush with death.

“Pull back! They’re through!” came a call from the ramparts, which was now a smouldering wreck.

Cullen glanced up, frowning, “I guess you have your way in. Best make use of it now, before they come back with reinforcements.”

“You’re just saying that cause you couldn't stand me gloating for another ten minutes.”

“I feel like that would be rather self-indulgent, given our circumstances.”

“Sure thing, Commander,” she replied with a conspiratorial wink.

Another sigh from within the cavern of his helmet, “we are wasting time, and you have blood all over your face, you realise?”

“Really? It’s not mine.”

“Hurry up, assholes!” Sid yelled from her place with Varric and the rest of the warriors. In their company, Asha had a feeling she would be feeling like the liability again in no time. “I need to find Anders!”

“Go.” Cullen said, “we’ll keep the main host occupied for as long as we can.”

“Remember to fall back if necessary,” Asha told him, “keep our men safe. I don’t want any more blood on my hands than I have to.”

“We’ll do what is necessary, Inquisitor, to keep _you_ safe,” Cullen said, his words serious and sincere. “I promised there would be no repeat of Haven, and I meant it. You remember the plan?”

“Take out the forces on the battlements to give you guys a foothold, use my many charms to persuade the Wardens to surrender, try not to die?”

“If you can clear them out, we’ll cover your advance. We’ll be right behind you - you have my word,” he told her.

“Be safe, Commander,” she said with a grin. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

“I’m holding you to that, Inquisitor,” he said, placing his hand over hers where it still rested on his arm, the metal warming under her touch. She hadn’t even realised she was still holding onto him. 

Even though she couldn’t really make out his face behind his helmet, she felt pinned in a promise by his gaze.

“Fucking wardens. Fucking blood mages. Fucking archdemons,” Anders panted, as they raced up the steps after Erimond and Clarel. “It says everything about my life, that stopping the Fifth Blight was only the fucking prologue.”

Asha was too breathless to respond, and even Sidonie, drenched in other people's sticky guts and her own sweat, didn’t have a witty quip to throw back at her friend. Asha remembered being rooted in the spot in the courtyard, looking up at Clarel and watching the Warden Commander realise what exactly it was that she’d done. Her mouth had been dry. She'd had no words. It had been the Abomination of Kirkwall, not the Herald of Andraste, who had finally managed to talk the woman down and prevent her from finishing the ritual:

“You’re the reason we’re so reviled in the bloody first place,” Anders had raged, grey eyes starting to glow silver, “blindly murdering your own, for a power you don’t understand and cannot hope to control, all because you’re afraid of… what? Not fulfilling your duty? Or is it simply your selfish fear of dying? Guess what - you’re mortal, that’s what we’ve all got to look forward to!

“Was all this worth it? Can’t you see what has happened to the mages around you? They’re _empty_. I know what it’s like to be an abomination: it's like you're trapped in your own body, seeing out your eyes, while someone else moves you like a puppet. And you're trying to scream, to move a single muscle, but there's no escape. Until you look down at the blood on your hands…”

She’d never heard him speak like that. As his fury stoked the stunned Wardens, finally, to action, she thought she began to see remnants of both the rebel and the abomination, within the tired shadow of the man who’d once been both.

They’d achieved everything they’d hoped - cleared the ramparts for Cullen's troops, gotten the wardens on-side to minimise their casualties as well as the Inquisition's own, arrived in time to stop both Erimond and Clarel from finishing the ritual. And still everything was going wrong. 

She supposed she had to agree with Anders: fucking archdemons.

They sprinted up onto the utmost balcony of Adamant. The sky was a dark and churning mass around them, filled with the shrieks of demons and the low, rumbling growls of the dragon that vibrated through her skin. In front of them was Clarel, and the dark, decaying corpse of Corypheus’ archdemon. Asha barely had time to cry out before it lunged and snapped up the Warden Commander like she was a ragdoll, the teeth clamping around her torso and flinging her up in the air like a mabari with a toy.

Clarel screamed in pain, and was smashed back down onto the stonework in a bloody tangle of limbs. Asha made a choked sound at the brutality of it, starting forward unthinkingly to aid the Warden Commander, until Cassandra clamped a hand down on her wrist to hold her back. Then, impossibly, Clarel's crumpled body began to move. With her vows rising from her lips, she held up a mangled, bloody hand, and threw a chained lightning spell at the beast. 

It seemed that, despite everything, the Commander of the Grey Wardens ended up a blood mage after all, because the spell that came out of her was far stronger than any Asha had seen. Lightning lanced across the monster's scales and the smell of burning filled the air. It thrashed and spasmed, baying in agony as it attempted to fly. Its ungainly, convulsing body smashed through the stonework as it scrambled for an escape.

“Flash, get back!” Varric shouted from somewhere behind them, as the platform beneath them started to give way. 

Asha turned to flee and made it a few stumbling steps before, suddenly, they were falling into darkness. She felt her anchor pulse, a flare of energy racing through the muscles of her arm like wildfire, and did the only thing she could think to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope people enjoy this chapter, the sole purpose of which was to put Asha and Cullen through every Battle Couple trope I could think of - bar 'back-to-back badasses', which I've decided to save up for a special occasion. The next chapter is a lot more angsty, so I wanted us all to have fun with part 1 of the battle for Adamant.
> 
> Author's notes: part of what Anders says to Clarel and the Grey Warden mages is taken from a companion conversation he has with Merril in Dragon Age II, where he's telling her she's an idiot to be involved in blood magic and discussing what it feels like to be possessed by a spirit. The rest of his speech is mine ^^
> 
> Hope everyone has been having a good week! I am gearing up to move back home to Scotland soon, even though I will still be working from home and observing quarantine once I get there. Hope everyone is staying as safe as they can, and that this fanfic is serving as good emotional support in the hellscape that is 2020. All of your comments and kudos are certainly helping me cope :D xxxx


	47. Chapter Forty-Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here Lies the Abyss, part 2.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: references to past abuse, violence, Nightmare demon being mean and generally awful

Cullen watched the half-sealed fade rift float silently in the air above him.

_What happened in Haven, I will not let it happen again. You have my word._

He remembered his words to the Inquisitor, when he was calm, and foolish enough to make promises that he apparently couldn’t keep. The ache is his chest that had been there since Varric had explained that Asha was once again lost grew like a tear in paper, guilt settling in and taking root.

Another battle that asked too much of a single woman. Another forsaken place into which he could not follow, or have any hope of protecting her from. Another indeterminable wait, in which he dare not let himself wish for her return.

But if she came back... _when_ she came back, it would be through here. As the Inquisition bound Erimond in chains and began to tend to their wounded, Cullen refused to move from his spot, dictating orders to Rylen while the light of the rift burnt so brightly it left a shadow whenever he closed his eyes.

Asha didn’t know how long they’d been here. It could’ve been hours, but it felt like years. She just wanted it to _end_. 

How was she going to break the news to Solas, that the Fade was awful, actually?

“Why is it always fucking spiders?” Sid grumbled, the only sound other than the crunch of gritty dirt underfoot.

“What… spiders?” Asha asked, tiredly.

“They’re fearlings,” came the low, booming voice of Justice. It emanated out of Anders’ body, which was now a latticework of light. Silver bled from his eyes, and through the seams of the lightning shaped scar on his cheek. The spirit which the Fade had drawn to the surface sounded disgusted, like he’d found something on the bottom of his - well, Anders’ - boot. “They are scavengers, scrounging what little fear they can get from the dregs of the behemoth’s gluttony. So they take the form of something which scares you, in a bid to take more than scraps.”

“Oh.” Asha’s whisper was one of brutal understanding.

“Fair enough,” Sid sighed, chafing her hands up and down her arms as if willing away a chill, “that fucking varterral and its stupid squiggly limbs still gives me nightmares. Too many joints.”

“I see maggots,” Cassandra muttered, “crawling in filth.”

Asha tensed and hugged her arms. She didn’t say what she saw when they cut these... ‘fearlings’ down. Shambling bodies, wearing the slackjawed, expressionless faces of people she knew. Each with a sunburst star in the centre of their forehead. The first time Bull had stabbed one, she’d turned and vomited on the rocky ground, while Blackwall held her arm and asked, inanely, if she was ok.

Oh, to just see spiders. She willed herself to keep moving, placing one foot in front of the other. She wanted to be free from here. She needed to _get out_.

Suddenly, a voice echoed around them, feeling like a slick, invasive fingertip running down the column of her spine, tracing a spiral over her scarred brand. “Ah, we have a visitor,” it said. “Some foolish little girl comes to steal back the fear I kindly lifted from her shoulders. You should’ve thanked me, and left your fear where it lay, forgotten.”

“This is… not good,” came Bull’s terse assessment, as they descended the stairs.

“But you don’t want that, do you, little tranquil?” the voice continued, as Asha felt nausea well up inside her, “you want to be able to feel things, to pretend you are in control, no longer a puppet that was denied the luxury even of strings. Do you think that your pain will make you stronger? That this blind fury you take refuge in, just as mindless as what you were before, gives you purpose? I suppose you must, for you know what happens to those you love when you are weak. And you are… _always_... weak. The only one who grows stronger from the fear you so desperately cling to, in order to convince yourself you are alive, is me.”

Cassandra made a wounded sound, like she’d just watched a puppy get kicked in the street. “Asha…” she murmured, reaching out.

“I swear to Mythal and all her fucking host, if you touch me right now I _will_ hit you,” Asha snapped. “Let’s just keep moving, get the fuck out of here.”

“I was going to take it all, you know,” the demon murmured once more, almost conversational now it knew it had their attention, “every last drop. You came to me so fresh, so ripe, with that mark bringing everything back to you in one delicious rush. So afraid, when you cowered in the dark and waited for them to come for you, as they cut down your family one by one. I can still take it from you, if you want, little tranquil. All of it. Why try to reclaim what little pain I eased, when every templar that has haunted your nightmares can be mine, and they never have to bother you again.”

The demon said it like it was offering a boon, but Asha knew it was really just another threat. She knew how much fear had forged her. This was just a promise to once more render her a blank slate - which of course terrified her, and so fed the demon even more.

“Ok, I’m just going to say it,” said Sid to the air, as the party doggedly trudged on, “this fucker needs to die.”

It was Valour that got her through.

Valour had been forged by courage in battle, so she supposed it made sense. Even as she doubted everything around her, she trusted it to protect her. The song it sang when she plunged the blade through Nightmare’s malformed skull was the sweetest chord she’d ever heard.

In the aftermath, panting and spitting ichor out of her mouth, Asha looked around at their assembled group. Each was bloody, with lacerations across their bodies and faces. No one but Justice and Hawke met her gaze. Bull's jaw was tight with discomfort. Cassandra was just as shattered as her, the echo of her former mentor and her hopes for Asha’s divinity firmly yanked away. But it was over. They could get away.

“Ever onwards,” Sid said, her voice tired but still somehow dry, “I don’t know how Varric manages to make these sort of moments glorious, in his books.”

“Let us leave,” Cass said, and then strode towards the rift on stiff legs, stepping over the corpses they’d left.

They marched forward, the rift and its promise of escape claiming their entire attention. At the back of the group, Asha’s tiredness was so bone deep, it had honestly slipped from her mind that the Nightmare existed in two forms. When the bloated, gargantuan version of the demon that had glutted on their suffering moved to split the party and block their way, Hawke’s “of fucking course” pretty much summed up her own feelings on the matter.

“We need to clear a path,” Asha said. Nightmare sat there, watching her with its inhuman eyes, not bothering to advance from its spot between them and the rift. It did not need to attack, because the fight was already entirely on its terms. It merely watched them squirm with a look of greedy satisfaction, knowing that it had them trapped precisely like flies in its web.

She knew what it wanted from her - more of that suicidal despair, the sense of worthlessness that had driven her to walk out of the Haven chantry and into Corypheus’ path.

Well, you know what? She wouldn’t give it the _fucking_ satisfaction. “We could take it together,” she said, glancing over at Hawke and Justice.

“No need, Inquisitor,” Justice replied

"What?"

“If you think about it the varterral was easy enough,” Sidonie said breezily, glancing over at her friend and reaching over to pat his glowing arm. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine, darling."

Asha glanced between them, "W-what are you talking about?”

“Ever since we entered Adamant in our disguise, I have sensed the Nightmare brewing here for days,” Justice intoned in his low, inhuman voice, staring up at the beast through Anders' eyes. “The fears of mages, becoming what the Circle told them they were always destined to be. The fear _of_ mages, of the monsters that drink the blood of the innocent, and so become gods that one cannot ever hope to fight. A perversion of duty, and the Justice that Wardens should mete. Thank you for getting me here, Inquisitor - the demon was warping my mage’s dreams and preventing me from getting close. Now, I am here. A fitting end for me. A Just one.”

“You’re going to - You want to kill it? But you’ll - but Anders will - he’ll die!”

“You see, Justice and I are in two minds about that, if you’ll pardon the pun,” Anders said, as his eyes shifted and his voice became his own again. He cocked his head in a much more human expression, though his scars still glowed. He looked at the Nightmare demon, gave a low whistle and a wince, “I mean, mostly. You sure about this, Sid?”

“If there’s anyone who can survive the Fade, it’s Anders.” Hawke explained, “Justice and him are too tightly woven together for him to be claimed by any other demon. And while this is not how I imagined it happening, Anders and I had devised a rather... elaborate plan for him to _mysteriously_ number amongst the dead in this particular battle. A heroic final sacrifice for the good of all, redeeming the Abomination of Kirkwall - I hear you fully endorse that kind of thing, Inquisitor.”

“Only, up until about thirty seconds ago, it simply meant me not going through your rift,” Anders added weakly, “not, you know, fighting a giant spider thing.”

So that’s what they’d been murmuring about while she tried to talk Bull down from the initial panic that he’d had, at finding himself in the Fade. Asha gained a whole new appreciation for Hawke’s ability to improvise plans on the fly.

“Beggars - and abominations - can’t be choosers,” Sid said, with a small grin, even though her voice didn’t sound entirely steady. She clapped Anders on the shoulder. “Did you really think walking through the Fade would be all sunshine and roses? We _are_ trying to get you off a _treason_ charge, you know.”

Anders, impossibly, gave a small chuckle, leaned over and kissed the Champion of Kirkwall on the cheek. “The things I do for you, Sidonie Hawke,” he sighed, like she’d simply asked him to go fetch her some tea, not take down a greater demon single-handedly.

“I… I mean, are you sure?” Asha asked.

“Not in the slightest,” Anders said with his wry, self-deprecating smile, as he took her hands in his, squeezed them reassuringly, and then kissed her on the cheek as well, a brief, almost brotherly gesture. “But if it’s between me, you, and Hawke? I know who deserves to see the other side.”

He dropped her hands and then made a shooing motion. His hands were actually steady, not trembling at all, “now go! Both of you! And please, make sure that the Wardens don’t go axe crazy, anymore than they already are? And that Varric writes something excellent about me, of course. I expect him to refer to me as 'dashing' at least three times."

His storm grey eyes began to glow again. Then Justice took over, Asha was running, and everything was quicksilver bright.

Cullen watched the Fade Rift open, heart hammering as relief hit in a giddy wave. Cassandra dropped through first, face ashen, taut.

Then Bull, then Blackwall.

“Boss is on her way,” Bull grunted, “got anything I can kill?”

Cullen took in the flat, pained faces of all three, and shook his head. They’d finished cleaning up the demons an hour into their four-hour wait, once the remaining Wardens had all surrendered and aided them in their efforts. “Then I guess I’ll just go break some stuff,” the Qunari said, and stalked away without a backwards glance.

“What happened?” Cullen asked.

“Do not ask,” Cass replied sharply. “Not yet.”

But then the seconds drew out, became minutes, and still the Inquisitor did not appear. Cassandra began to pace. In the watery shimmer of the Fade, glimpsed through the rift, Cullen saw the hulking form of a massive shadow, and then a blinding flash of bright silvery light that he had to squint against, raising a hand to cover his face.

And then Asha barrelled out of the Fade, directly onto him.

Instinctively, he caught her, stumbling back a few steps with the momentum as his arms reached around and braced to stop her from falling. Despite all her muscle, she wasn’t heavy, warm but shaking within the circle of his arms, and she honestly smelt… disgusting, like sulphur, and blood.

Her breath, next to his ear, was ragged with exertion and seemed on the edge of sobs. After a brief moment where he couldn’t fight the sheer relief at having her back, he carefully loosened his grip and deposited on her feet, moving back a step back to take in her similarly drawn, tired expression. Tacky, dark green blood coated the left side of her face and most of her clothing. “Inquisitor?” he asked, his hands still on her arms in order to steady them both.

“My, if only we all had such a warm reception,” remarked Sidonie, who had tumbled out a second after Asha and landed on her hands and knees. The jest sounded exceedingly hollow.

Asha cast a silent look towards the Champion that Cullen could swear made the woman flinch. _Hawke_. Flinching. Would wonders - or horrors - never cease? Then the Inquisitor looked up into the rift, shuddered, and raised her hand, closing it shut with a crackling pulse from the anchor. When it was over, she sagged in a way that meant Cullen once more had to take some of her weight, just to keep her standing.

“Can you... get me out of here?” she rasped hoarsely, eyes not meeting his. She leaned against him. There was space between their bodies, but her forehead rested against the blood spattered plate at his shoulder, and still her request was barely loud enough for even him to hear. “I’m not up for big speeches, or anything. I need to just… not be here.”

“Of course,” Cullen said, with mounting concern. He hastily glanced around for Solas or Sera or somebody that would be able to escort her as his duties kept him here. He couldn’t see anyone, and when he opened his mouth to shout for Cassandra, who was speaking with Varric, the Seeker's whole body suddenly started quaking as she began, impossibly, to cry.

“I’ll cover the hero bullshit, _and_ the Wardens,” Sidonie announced as she straightened to standing, dusting herself off. “Take care of her, Commander. We’ll speak before I leave.”

Cullen guessed that meant he was the one who was responsible for the Inquisitor, then.

“I’ll get you to the healer’s tents, Asha,” he said - they’d been erected in one of the front courtyards already, it would only be a brief diversion from the work clearing Adamant. “Should I - that is - would it be better if - can you walk?”

“I can walk,” she muttered, but didn’t say anything when he kept a hand on her shoulders as she took the first shaking steps. He told himself it was to steer her in the right direction, but that was a blatant lie. He was half shocked she was even there, and terrified by what he saw in her face.

As he began to lead her away, he heard Sidonie’s voice rise behind them, “Many of you know of Anders as the apostate who destroyed Kirkwall. But he was a Warden first, one who knew the dangers of letting a cause blind you to reality, and one who has paid a dear price today, for the foolishness of your _own_ choices…”

Her cadence was one of a heroic ballad, as she began to announce to the world what seemed to be the tale of Anders’ final sacrifice. _Never mind that no one knew the Inquisition had been working with him directly in the first place_ , Cullen thought with a wince, wondering what the consequences of that particular revelation would be. But he supposed he expected nothing less, from the Champion of Kirkwall. Chaotic to the last. At least the defeated Wardens made for an extremely non-judgemental audience.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lol so funny story, genuinely gave myself anxiety drafting some of this and had to take a walk to decompress afterwards. Do not throw your tranquil characters into a Nightmare dimension, if you want them to have a nice time. Seriously. 
> 
> Hopefully it's not too unpleasant to read, I tried to tone it down a lot, and there's a reason why I try to get through Adamant in two chapters flat! The next chapter is a lot less stressful!
> 
> I also hope this was a satisfying conclusion/solution to Here Lies the Abyss. I personally ascribe to the theory that whoever you sacrifice in this mission probably survives the Fade, and I've always been frustrated that Anders is not one of the options for the Warden companion, given his extensive history with Corypheus and, you know, Hawke. Hence, why I wrote it all here! What else is fanfic for :')


	48. Chapter Forty-Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The road back from the Western Approach, and that one time Asha hit Iron Bull with a stick.

There was no easy way to say it - the days after Adamant were hard.

Cullen led Asha to a healer’s tent and sat with her - she didn’t know for how long, because by that point a buzzing haze had begun to crawl into her mind that made time meaningless. At one point, she came back to the cot she was perching on the edge of to find him putting a canteen of warm tea into her hands, reminding her of Solas when he'd tried to coax her through her first kill. The Commander’s expression was helpless where Solas’ had been calm and certain. It looked like he knew he didn’t have the words to make it better. And she didn’t either, so she drank all the tea to reassure him she was conscious, despite it tasting just as terrible as it had last time. 

Sometime later, Cole arrived. Asha didn’t notice the spirit enter, either because of the haze, or because that was simply how Cole moved through the world. Cullen startled when he appeared, so she supposed he’d ghosted through the camp as always. The boy ducked down into her vision, a pale face in the white white haze, placed his cool fingers in hers and said, in that sincere voice of his, “I’m so sorry. You must have been so, so frightened.”

Something inside Asha burst. Cole stayed with her when a hiccup became a sob. Asha didn’t know when the Commander left, but it must’ve been sometime before she finished crying. Through puffy, sore-lidded eyes, she blinked at the tent, which was empty save for the spirit sat against one of the cot’s legs, still loosely gripping her hand. As all of the day's events crashing down on her at once, she was so immediately exhausted that she nearly tipped forward out of her seat. Standing or righting herself felt like far too much effort, so she blindly laid back on the bare canvas cot and welcomed the blackness.

As she felt herself drift loose of consciousness, she heard a murmur of a male voice at the entrance, “is she... ok?”

“So bright, so strong. A flame so fierce, each smile is blinding. But bright heat takes fuel, and what will happen when the flame burns out? How dark the night will be, if you are not there to blaze through it.”

“Umm… forgive me, but that doesn't really answer my question.”

“She struck to the very heart of fear,” Cole replied, “it showed her its face, but that meant it was vanquished. She actually stabbed it there... through the face.”

“Oh.”

“She will be better. It will just be hard.”

 _Gods bless Cole, and his talent for understatement._ Asha tried to find his assessment reassuring as she slipped into the first of many absolutely shit, mercilessly restless, and nightmare-ridden sleeps.

There was a lot to do in Adamant, even after the Grey Wardens surrendered. Asha was out of commission for several days, but stood alongside the pyres and muttered her prayers when they laid the dead to rest.

Hawke was the first to leave. “I need rum. And Isabela,” the Champion announced with a long, cat-like stretch one morning, the very picture of nonchalance. But though she acted calm, she had her meagre belongings packed up, a horse saddled, and was all ready to go in under an hour, betraying her urgency. “I’ll check in on Weisshaupt, just… not right now.”

Varric was stood at the gates with his arms folded, watching his friend leave with the same feigned indifference. “And how are you and Rivaini going to get to Weisshaupt, exactly?”

“The Nocen Sea is supposed to be a lovely colour.”

“You’re going to sail Rivaini through _Qun_ territory?”

“Of course, and then, when they sink our ship this time round, presumably we’ll have time while the next one is being built to visit a charming landlocked fortress.”

“Well, give her my love, and thank you for not telling her _that_ plan anywhere near me,” Varric grumbled, hugging the Champion.

Sidonie turned to Asha and gave her a hug as well, tight enough that Asha could feel every muscle in the woman’s massive body. “You’ll be ok,” the Champion muttered in her ear, “don’t let Spider von Creepson get in your head.”

“I’ll… um… try not to?” Asha squeaked.

“Good. Demons are fuckers like that, but they only have power if we give it them.” Sidonie the non-mage said, stepping back and clapping her on the shoulder, “I like you, Herald of Andraste. Always nice to have someone else doing the hero-ing while I take a vacation. Keep up the stellar work, and maybe annoy a few more templars for me.” 

There was a pointed look up to the ramparts above, where Cullen - and Asha thought perhaps Cassandra as well - were watching their goodbyes. Sid smiled and gave them both a simpering wave, blowing a kiss. Asha thought she heard a familiar disgusted noise while Varric grinned.

“Nothing seems to bother her,” Asha murmured, as they watched Hawke's silhouette disappear into the heat mirage of the desert. 

“ _Everything_ bothers her, Flash,” Varric said tiredly, “she just doesn’t let that many people see it.”

It was all very well and good for the Champion of Kirkwall to tell her to shrug off the encounter with Nightmare, but Asha still got chills down her spine every third or fifth step, like someone was walking over her grave, or maybe dancing on it. She was grateful when clean-up finished and they started to discuss moving back to Skyhold. They drained Adamant’s wells to supply themselves and the Grey Wardens with enough water to travel through the desert in opposite directions, and left the ruined fortress behind them.

Another stretch of endless… fucking… travel. Asha made the return journey on barely three or four hours of sleep a night, and couldn’t even use her insomnia to do extra watches because she was so dazed and ineffectual. And _everyone_ knew why: she had to face the embarrassment of knowing that when she woke up from a nightmare thrashing and biting back screams, people heard her do it through the thin canvas of her tent. In the end, Cole offered to sit outside her tent and wake her before the noises got too much. 

“I don’t sleep, and they said it’s a way I can help,” he said, and then Asha glanced around, to see all of her friends very studiously not looking in her direction. It had nothing to do with the spirit’s misdirection powers.

She thought it was for this reason, perhaps, that Bull very publicly got Cassandra to hit him with a stick.

It was the first night they made it out of the desert. In full view of the whole camp, Bull loudly proclaimed the commencement of a “Qunari exercise to master his fear”, in a voice that carried, and then started yelling about demons while getting pummelled with a blunt weapon. Asha watched from the sidelines, trying not to get flustered: when she sparred with Cass, she rarely had a chance to appreciate how intimidatingly hot she was, when she was angry and hitting things. Dorian, Cullen, and Varric were all part of the audience too, and she wondered if they were all thinking along the same lines, to various degrees, regarding the two participants.

When Cass finally knocked Bull to the ground, he groaned and looked over at her where she watched, “what about you, Boss, you want a go?”

“Thanks Bull. But if getting hit by Cassandra stopped me from being scared, I think I would be pretty damn fearless by now.”

“I don’t think he meant getting hit,” Cass told her, walking over and offering the stick to her as he stood up and brushed himself down, getting in position for the next impact.

Asha looked down at it wide-eyed for a second, before realising: he’d asked Cassandra to do this, because she’d been there too. In the Fade. And while getting hit seemed to be helping Bull, she was almost certain that _hitting_ things helped Cass, who’d been terse, withdrawn, and business-like for days.

She was pretty sure it would help her too. She took the stick from the Seeker.

It was basically a mage’s staff, and she knew well enough how to fight with one of those. Even so, she was still weak when compared to Cassandra. “Please don’t laugh at me,” she said to Bull when she moved into position. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Boss,” he replied, as if he hadn’t just been goading Cass into toppling him seconds before, with all his bullshit about female warriors.

Asha adjusted her grip, shrugged out the tension from her shoulders, and then began spinning in a way that built up _momentum_. She might never be able to hit as hard as Cass, but she could land more blows, wielding the pole in a way that meant she could hit multiple times in quick succession, again, and again, until breathless. 

“There we go,” Bull said, after four hits, and then after another three, “oh yeah.”

“This is all a bit weirdly sexual, isn’t it?” Asha observed, as she bought it up in a wide arc over her head and then crashing down on his shoulder, aiming for a weak spot. He didn’t budge of course, but she heard a satisfying splintering inside the wood itself. “Gods, what are you made of? Stone?”

“You have no idea,” Dorian piped up from the sidelines. 

“Damn demon,” Bull muttered to himself, as if he wasn’t listening, “Who’s stuck in the Fade now?”

Asha kept quiet, and just kept working through the staff pattern. She started to get where Bull was coming from. There was something of a sanctuary in mindless violence, even if hitting Bull was like stabbing a brick wall and hoping for it to bleed.

“Piece of Fade piece of crap! And who killed you? That’s right, Iron _Fucking_ Bull.”

At that, Asha unthinkingly stepped to the side and went for the backs of his legs, getting in a full spin as a run up. With a grunt, she thwacked at the weak point behind his knees and carried the momentum all the way through. She made a pleased sound when it was enough - only just - to force him forward, onto one knee in the dirt. Remembering the weak girl who had fallen from the rift in Haven, seeing him budge just an inch closer to defeat made her feel recklessly strong. With her view now sideways on, she lifted her staff again and then, with a wordless, bellowing yell, slammed down with all her might across both his shoulders, and the juncture at the nape of his neck that was thick with muscle.

She realised afterwards that he hadn’t been expecting the blow - perhaps thinking she would stop her assault after she had him on the ground. Because otherwise, there was absolutely no way the move would have worked. There was a collective gasp from their audience as the wood splintered, cracked, and shattered across his back like a chair in a bar brawl, and with a surprised, delighted laugh the Iron Bull once again fell face down into the dirt.

In the silence that followed, Asha could hear her panting breathing, her heart thrumming in her chest with something that wasn’t fear, for the first time in weeks. “I think you’ll find... that I killed the Nightmare,” she said aloud, dropping the fractured remnants of the staff onto the floor as she caught her breath and raked a hand through her now sweaty hair.

The Qunari let out a chuckle and then a groan as he pulled himself up onto his hands and knees, spitting out a mouthful of soil. He looked up at her, and gave her an appreciative grin, “fuck yeah you did, Boss. And what a glorious fucking sight it was.”

“How are we doing there, Commander?” she heard Dorian say archly from the sidelines, making her glance up. She thought Cullen must’ve choked on a drink or something, because he was turning red and sputtering while the mage clapped him on the back. Not thinking anymore of it, she extended her hand out to help Bull up. She wrenched him up to standing, and he clapped her on the shoulder with enough force that she nearly fell to her knees herself, laughing the whole time.

Things started getting better, after that.

Another plus: rather than taking the circuitous route back, they received news from the scouts still stationed along the road that Josie had secured permission for them to take their armies through the Exalted Plains. It seemed that killing that demon army in Adamant had done wonders for their reputation in Orlais (if only to strike abject fear into certain nobles’ hearts), and Gaspard was now offering concessions in the hope of entering into talks with them. She didn’t really know who Gaspard was, but if it meant taking four days off their journey time, she wasn’t about to complain.

 _Dirthavaren_ was as grim as expected, given it was a place that had seen the deaths of thousands upon thousands of her people. The colourless grey landscape rather matched Asha’s own mood of absolute exhaustion, and she thought of her bed in Skyhold with exceeding fondness as Buttons trudged through the dry grass alongside Cullen and Cassandra’s mounts.

“Do you think Josie will have ordered more coffee?” she asked aloud, as she finished the last in a series of small braids in Buttons’ hair.

“We’ve been away for over two months, Inquisitor, so yes,” the Commander replied from her left, his eyes scanning the horizon for groups of enemy soldiers. He’d insisted on staying by her side as they navigated the warzone - though as she remembered pointing out to him, all of Thedas was a warzone, right now. Both he and Cassandra claimed it was best to have her at the front of the group in case they were accosted, both for protection and safe passage. Apparently, the Commander of the Inquisition had _papers_ of some kind, and she, well, had the anchor to back up his claims.

“Maybe I should write ahead and ask for chocolate,” she mused wistfully, “gods as my witness, I’d sell my soul for some chocolate right now. Cass, do you remember those little swan boat things in Val Royeaux? With the vanilla filling?”

“Inquisitor!” An interruption came from her left. Asha looked over her shoulder to see Solas riding up on her other side to catch her attention, “to the south east, do you see?”

Asha turned and looked in the direction he was pointing, squinting at the middle distance. All she could see was the flat, bleak landscape of the plains. She was about to ask what exactly he was pointing out to her, when she finally spotted it - a flash of red in the middle distance. Sails. On land.

 _A Dalish clan._ she realised, with a flash of longing.

“Oh,” she murmured.

“Inquisitor?” Cullen asked.

“It’s a… it’s a clan,” she told him, unable to tear her eyes away from the horizon, “I don’t recognise their colours. But…”

She bit her lip. It would be irresponsible to ask if she could visit them, if only because she had an entire host at her back. If she was a lone traveller or with a smaller group, it would be different, but she couldn’t abandon her post at the head of Inquisition's army to take a detour. And she was the head of an Andrastian organisation - the clan might not even _want_ her there.

Cullen looked at her face, which she realised was probably an open book, even if she hadn’t said her request out loud. “We could stop and make camp… here,” he offered carefully, even though it was only mid-afternoon and they normally marched until an hour before dusk. “In terms of our distance from Skyhold, it would not overly affect our journey, and the men could benefit from a break.”

Creators damn her, Asha didn’t even have the good grace to _pretend_ to think that one over. “Could we?” she said, “really?”

Cullen gave her a small smile. “You’re the one who ultimately commands this army, you realise?”

Asha halted the host almost immediately by the river, deciding she could have one abuse of power, as a treat. She peeled herself out of her dragon mail, pitched her tent quickly and haphazardly, and was walking Buttons out of the camp before the fires were even built. Her heart hammered with anticipation, and her gaze was pinned so tightly on the horizon that she didn’t even notice when a group massed around her: Cassandra, Cullen, and Solas.

“We can’t let you go out alone,” the Seeker told her. “Unless… do you think we would not be welcome?”

“The Inquisitor cannot go unaccompanied,” Cullen said firmly. Then he blinked at her, “are you _really_ not wearing armour?”

“I didn’t want to look like a threat. No arguments from you on that front, and you’ll get no arguments from me about escorts,” Asha said, desperate to simply get moving. She gave a sharp glance to Solas, “and… don’t be rude, ok?”

She mounted up and immediately urged Buttons into a gallop, dust scattering behind her as she raced across the plains, the others keeping pace. Slowly, the clan came into view. It was a small encampment in the alcove under a small bluff, with only five aravels, each with crimson sails. She saw a handful of elves scattered amongst them, surprised by how few there were. They looked up warily when she came into view, and she slowed her pace, raising her hands in the gesture of a friendly enquiry for entrance. A man in the clan waved back, giving permission for them to proceed.

They tied up their horses and she led their way into the camp. The same stern looking man with long, white hair and a vallaslin dedicating him to Elgar’nan walked out to greet them, “ _andaran atish’an_. It is good to see another of the People, in this place from which we all came.”

Asha could practically _feel_ whatever counter-narrative Solas wanted to pose brewing behind them, so she cast a stern glance back his way to signal to him to be quiet. “ _Andaran atish’an_ ,” she replied, and made to ask formally for welcome into the camp before she realised she… couldn’t. “My friends and I were hoping we might partake of your hospitality, and share news of... may I ask what clan this is?”

“We have no name,” the man told her, gently, “that is… I am Keeper Hawen, but the clan you see before you does not bear the name of my people. We are the remnants of all those that lived in this land before the War of the Lions - now we band together to keep each other safe. To give us one name would disrespect the heritage of many here.”

“Oh.” Asha didn’t know what to say to that, exactly. The sense of kinship that she instinctively felt doubled to an ache in her chest. “I’m sorry for your loss.” In elvish she said, “ _may Falon’Din guide those you now miss to peaceful rest_.”

“ _Ma Serannas_. What is your clan, sister? If you...” he looked warily at her human companions, both of them in armour, “have one?”

Asha hesitated. She didn’t want to lie, but she still didn’t know how much of Clan Lavellan’s story - and how much of what followed - had gotten out. The Andrastian symbol Cass wore was already earning wary looks. 

“Ashatarsylnin is the last surviving member of Clan Lavellan,” Solas said, seemingly making the decision for her.

Behind Keeper Hawen, one woman with dark hair and a black vallaslin startled and froze at this pronouncement. She stared at Asha for a moment wide-eyed, before hurrying into the cavern near where the last aravel was parked. _Oh fuck,_ Asha thought. So news of the Herald of Andraste had reached here, and they didn’t want to associate with her. She couldn’t even blame them for making that decision.

“Then welcome, _da’len_ , and to your friends,” Hawen said, not showing the same shock as the other clan member did at her name. “If you are the last of your people, it seems we have more in common than we knew, and you are welcome by our fire.”

“I’m… not sure if I can stay long,” Asha said, suddenly flustered. She’d been so excited to see other Dalish that she hadn’t thought of what she would do once she was there. “Um, I’m a… mage?” she continued, aware of the signal of status that gave her, “so is my companion. And my other friends are, well, they’re very strong. If you’re suffering right now, do you need any help with anything?”

They followed the Keeper into the camp to sit by his aravel, as he brewed a pot of tea and started telling them of the restless spirits that plagued the landscape, wakened by the new bloodshed of the _shemlen’s_ war. Asha bit the inside of her cheek - that hadn’t really been what she’d meant when she offered help, and she couldn’t face the idea of fighting any more demons right now. But she saw Cullen nod seriously, and realised he’d probably get the Inquisition’s troops onto it without any prompting. Hawen then started talking about some rockslides in the area, which she felt far more qualified to address. 

She was quizzing him on the details, when suddenly she heard a small gasp behind her. Solas was sat opposite her in the circle with Hawen, and when he looked up at the sound and saw its source, his eyes widened in shocked amazement. That was enough to make Asha worried - it took a lot to surprise Solas. 

She shifted round in her seat to see what had happened, and her heart almost stopped at the sight of what lay before her.

By the cavern entrance, with the hand of the dark haired woman Asha had seen before around her wrist leading her out, was a young elven woman in the same Dalish armour as the rest of the Clan. She had a hand clutched to her chest, over her heart. She was short and plump, though she’d clearly been through several months of hardship, and had a halo of tangled red curls falling just below her pointed ears. Her face was heart shaped and covered in freckles, her eyes were deep earthy brown, and wide as dinner plates at the sight of Asha’s own upturned face.

And across her cheeks were the branching lines of a simple Mythal vallaslin, that arched around the sides of her shining eyes in dark teal ink. Asha knew that that shade of ink had been chosen specifically to highlight the flecks of green that you would find in the girl’s dark eyes, if you leaned in and looked closely.

The woman opened her mouth, “...Ash?”

Asha stood up, her ears roaring and her knees quaking. For a second she thought she might faint. She knew that face. So well, she dared not believe it. To be sat in a Dalish camp, looking at the woman in front of her, she was certain this must be some kind of dream.

“...El-Ellana?” she said, as the sister she’d long thought was dead began to cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, um, is now a good time to mention that I might not be updating next week...? 👿 👿 👿 
> 
> Real talk, I'm moving back to my flat next weekend, so next week's update may be late/skipped entirely depending on how well I handle life stuff. Updates will resume after that as normal. Sorry to leave things on such a cliffhanger, I guess this means this is potentially... end of Part II? (With Asha yeeting herself out of Haven as the end of Part I).
> 
> I'm so excited for where the story is going to go from here, I can't wait to have it ready for you!!
> 
> Author's note: a lot of the stuff about Keeper Hawen's Clan was made up by me to make up for the fact that they don't seem to be given a name in the original lore.


	49. Chapter Forty-Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A family! reunion! takes place.

“I… I don’t understand,” Asha heard herself saying, from far away, “h-how?”

The world was falling away, and yet at the same time everything seemed to stand still. Ellana Lavellan was now twenty-two - no, she would've just turned twenty-three - years old. Asha’s eyes roamed over her hungrily, drinking in every change, and she knew that her sister was doing the same, seeing how their years apart had shaped them into strangers. There were no scars, Asha noticed, and thank the gods, because she would’ve burned the entire world to the ground if there were. Ellana’s body was still soft and curvy, but somewhat thinner, her face a touch leaner. She looked tired. Her hair was shorter than Asha could ever have imagined. When El was younger, she used to scream whenever their parents tried to go near it with a blade. When Asha had last seen her sister, it had reached her waist, and they had always spent an impractical amount of time tying it into elaborate knots before she was capable of being any help around camp.

Asha wondered what _she_ looked like. She was well-fed and strong now, with two humans in armour at her back. Her hair grown long where Ellana's was short. Her clothes were rumpled from days of travel, but they were _expensive_ , in particular the calfskin riding gloves she wore to hide the anchor. She didn’t look… particularly Dalish.

And still she was talking, or trying to talk while her brain stuttered and struggled through sentences. “I thought-” she started, “you - I can’t - El, is it really... how are you… here?"

Tears ran down Ellana’s face. She had her knuckles over her mouth to muffle her sobs. Asha wondered, distantly, why she wasn’t already hugging her, but when she took another step forward, her knees didn’t seem to comply. She wobbled and stumbled to the right of her destination, like a drunkard. She thought she saw someone outside her field of vision lunge to steady her, but she dodged them and then made this… this… _noise_. It was an embarrassing noise, like a wounded animal.

She couldn’t take her eyes off Ellana.

“ _Da’lath’in,_ ” Asha said weakly, her hands outstretched in front of her. She didn’t know what to do.

In the end, it was Ellana who moved first. She dropped her hands away from her tear-stained face and walked forward on her bare feet. She look just as unsteady as Asha did. She reached out, and took Asha’s trembling hands in her own. They both jumped at the first contact, as if they were both expecting the other to not actually be real.

“You survived?” Asha breathed.

“I… I hid,” her sister said in a thick voice, barely above a whisper, “when they came.”

Both of them struggled for breath for a few moments.

“H-how?” Asha choked on the word.

“When they - I was with Mahanon, watching him fish-”

“-I know.” Asha muttered. She thought she… well, she remembered everything about that day. Everything _before_. That was why… when she’d seen Mahanon alone, and then watched him fall… she thought...

“He told me to go to the cave on the south bank,” Ellana told her, looking at their intertwined hands. Asha knew the one she meant - it was a mostly useless but well-hidden little cove lit by deep mushrooms, that only really mattered to the people in camp who were desperate for any kind of privacy. “When we heard the yells coming from camp. I don’t know how I - I mean, I saw a few of them, but they were running towards the… they didn’t notice me. He told me to wait there, in the cave, until he came back with more people… he never came back…”

Ellana closed her eyes for a second, then continued, “I didn’t have anything on me, Ash. I… I wanted to help but I couldn’t have done anything. I’m not… I’m not like you. I had no weapons, nothing. I was just… s-scared. I couldn’t… just… die. I stayed there for… for three days. I didn’t hear them move on. No one came for me. That’s why I - when I walked through the camp I didn’t see your body but I thought - they hate mages, _asa'ma'lin_ \- I didn’t realise - I thought you were dead - but y-you weren’t. You’re here - you must have...”

And that was when Asha realised, with brutal clarity. Ellana didn’t know. Ellana had no way of knowing what had happened to her that day. Which meant… she thought…

She thought she’d left her.

“No, no, no, _da’lath’in_ ,” she said brokenly, her hands shaking. “I didn’t - I couldn’t have -”

“I thought you were _dead_.” Ellana didn’t break her hold, but the pain was clear in her voice.

“I thought you were all gone-” Asha choked on a sob, and continued, needing her to understand, “You’ve got to understand, _da’lath’in_. I’ve only been… back, for… for a few months. They did something to me, Ellana. That day. Some magic, something evil, it made me - I went away for a long time. I wasn’t myself. I couldn’t… I can’t remember what even happened after, the memory isn’t there. If you’d seen me, I wouldn’t even have known who you were. I was e-empty, everything just... ripped out of me. I had no awareness of my surroundings, who I was or why - I just started walking. _Fen’harel ver ma,_ I must have w-walked away from the camp just before you…”

She started crying, and the world seemed to snap into place again, and she lunged forward, wrapping her sister in a tight embrace, unable to stop herself. “I can’t believe you’re here!” she sobbed into Ellana’s hair. “I thought I was the only one they hadn’t-”

“Mother and father, they’re both-”

“I know.”

“And I was the only person who- I just let it happen-”

“Oh, _da’lath’in_. If you did, then so did I,” Asha pulled back slightly, and hissed the words fiercely willing her sister to believe them, “I thought the same thing. I stayed behind to fight, even, but I couldn’t do _anything_ , El. They took everything from us, and I just watched. At least… if you… if you’re here... Creators be praised…”

She gripped her sister into a tighter hug like she was afraid she might disappear. And when she felt her sister’s arms come around her and rest directly over the ice cold skin of her tranquil brand, she whispered into her close-cropped hair, “ _ar lath ma, vhenan._ ”

Wide-eyed and slightly dazed, Cullen, Cassandra and Solas all agreed to wait at the edge of Hawen’s camp, while Asha sat by the campfire and told Ellana and her new clan everything that had happened since the Lavellan massacre two and a half years ago. Cullen looked grey and a little sick, and simply nodded silently, when she gave the three of them her snivelling dismissal - she was, of course, not yet able to stop crying.

Ellana’s own story was not much different from Asha's own, except she had made her shell-shocked walk away from the decimated camp with a purpose. Rather than risk going closer to Kirkwall during the unrest to find friends amongst Clan Sabrae, she’d taken the gold out of the clan coffers, paid to take a boat directly across the Waking Sea, and sought out the clans in southern Orlais. She’d joined the dark haired woman, Emalien’s, clan first, which meant that by the time they’d fled their territory as the war grew more violent and she joined with Hawen, the Lavellan name had already been left behind. She’d introduced herself to others only as Ellana.

As for Asha’s own story…

“ _You’re the Herald of Andraste,_ ” Ellana said, mouth agape. “You’re the Andrastian prophet Gaspard’s trying to sweet talk? We thought you must be a Circle mage, given that you were…”

Like many people Asha knew, El couldn’t bring herself to say the word ‘tranquil’. When Asha had gone into details about exactly what the templars had done to her, her sister had begun trembling with anger. Instead of retreading the same painful ground, Asha peeled off her glove and showed her the anchor, flexing her fingers, “yep, that’s me. The anchor reestablished my connection to the Fade.”

Her sister ran her hand directly over the vortex of Fade energy in the centre of her palm, as if checking it was real. Asha smiled: very few people dared do that, as if they were worried they'd lose a finger, or something. “But that’s… You killed an army of Grey Wardens, just last month! You and fifty men! And then you went into the Fade, and challenged the Prince of Demons to a duel with a magic sword!”

“Goodness, is that what they’re telling people?” Asha asked, weakly.

“Do you know the Champion of Kirkwall? Oh my gods, _do you know the Prince of Starkhaven?_ There’s a ballad saying he’s courting you!”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“The bards say that no woman in Thedas was holy enough to satisfy the Prince’s piety, before Andraste blessed you.”

“Holy… fucking… shit.”

“Well, maybe she’s not quite that suitable for him, just yet,” commented Hawen with a wide grin. It was a smile that had been on his face ever since the two sisters had reunited. The whole clan had been brought into a circle around the campfire as the sky began to darken overhead. History was made to be shared, and it wasn’t every day that someone as influential as the Inquisitor walked into camp. Happy reconciliations also seemed to be in short supply.

Ellana was still blinking at her. “Does this mean you live in a castle?!”

“...Maybe,” Asha admitted, awkwardly. 

“That’s amazing!”

“You could…” Asha looked around the circle, “I mean, you all could, if you wanted to…”

She didn’t dare bring herself to say it, couldn’t dare hope. The Dalish weren’t meant to live in big grand buildings.

“We are already on our way to safer climes, _da’len_ ,” Hawen said, already understanding the offer she was trying to convey. “But I’m sure Ellana would be more than happy to join you, in your new home.”

Asha looked at her sister, heart soaring in her chest. “I mean, if you’re happy here, I can… maybe I can get myself stationed in the Dales for a while…”

“Ash, don’t be a fucking idiot,” her sister said, sternly. “Let me get this straight: you have a glowing hand that means some big nasty is after you, and you need an army to protect you from it, in your big, fancy castle?”

“Um, kind of?”

“Then _of course I’m coming with you_ ,” El sighed, shaking her head, “do you really think I’m ever letting you out of my sight _again_?” she reached out and took Asha’s hand, “now that I’ve gotten my Keeper back, I have to stay with her, right? Lavellan has to have at least be two people, if we want to really call it a clan.”

Asha, embarrassingly, started sobbing again. El tutted, though her voice was shaking as they pulled each other in for another hug, “you always were the emotional one.”

Asha focused on scouring her face clean of tears while Ellana said her own round of _extremely_ emotional goodbyes and packed up her one small bag of belongings - “we haven’t really travelled with anything that isn’t light in months,” she told her - and then the two of them just... walked out of camp. Everything had changed, by chance, in a matter of minutes. It was taking a lot of time to sink in.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Asha muttered. “You know where I am now… I can come back for you, you can spend more time-”

“Ash,” Ellana told her, gripping her hand in a steely tight grip and interlocking their fingers, “I vowed to the Creators, that if I ever saw someone from Lavellan again, I’d never let them out of my sight. And I meant it. I’m only lucky that they felt like rewarding that promise with my most precious sister.”

Asha sniffled, and El said, “if you cry again I swear, with Mythal as my fucking witness…”

It was fully dark now, but the rest of Asha’s party were still sat, waiting with the horses. They all hastily stood when they saw the two of them approach, arranging themselves in an almost formal presentation. Cassandra was the most adorable - while Asha was used to Cullen being almost consistently flustered, the sight of the Seeker dusting herself down and trying to smooth her hair in the presence of her family was possibly the cutest thing in existence.

“So…” Asha said awkwardly, knowing every word out of her mouth would be inadequate for how she felt in this moment. But they’d all seen her break down. They all knew what this meant. “This is my sister.”

“Ellana Lavellan,” El said, giving a small nod of her head, “I’ll be travelling with you from now on.”

There was a moment of silence, and then in the darkness Cassandra let out a choked sob. “Asha,” the Seeker said, barely holding back whatever emotion was… well… _unexpectedly_ gripping her, “that’s just… so wonderful! I can barely believe… it’s like something from a book! I’m so happy for you!”

“Oh my gods,” Asha whispered, and then her friend had barrelled into her, strong-arming her into a hug even though she did not let go of Ellana’s hand. She was immediately fighting back tears again.

“This is… Cassandra Pentaghast,” she said, when both she and Cass finally got their emotions in check. “She was there, the day I woke up. She menaced me into an Andrastian cult. This is Solas - he sorted out my fade-hand-ness in the first place. And this is Cullen Rutherford and he, well, he kind of runs the army. No. He runs the army, there’s no ‘kind of’ about it.”

“The one that defeated the Grey Wardens?”

“Yes. It’s much bigger than fifty people.” Asha said. She imagined Cullen’s frown at that with a smile and thought to tell him about their exaggerated exploits later, although his face was currently not even that visible in the dark.

“Welcome to the Inquisition, _lethallan_ ,” Solas said, bowing to Ellana, “...the family resemblance is striking.”

“ _Ma serannas_. What clan do you hail from, _lethallin_?”

“Solas doesn’t belong to any clan,” Asha explained. “He actually doesn’t like the Dalish very much at all. He thinks we’re all reclusive idiots.”

Solas sighed, “Asha…”

“What, have I spoken a lie?”

“Well, perhaps if the Dalish could raise people with spirits like yours…”

“Nuh-uh, don’t you use empty flattery just to get my sister on your good side!” Despite her words, Asha beamed at the word ‘sister’, unable to stop herself. She nudged Ellana, “ask him what he thinks about the benedictions to Andruil, _da’lath’in_. He’ll argue about it until he’s red in the face.”

“I’m not _you_ , Ash.” El said with a weary sigh, and the sudden return to a familiar routine from nearly three years ago made Asha’s laugh have a slightly hysterical edge.

“Welcome, Ellana.” Cullen said, and it was oddly clipped, although not necessarily rude. Asha was about to ask what was wrong, when he said. “We should return soon, Inquisitor. We cannot see incoming threats in the dark.”

“Camp is _right there_ , Cullen,” Asha said, gesturing to the golden glow of campfires on the horizon. It had barely been half a mile’s journey to get here in the first place.

“Even so. Your… sister must want to get settled.”

Well, that was abrupt. But Asha supposed she had kept them all waiting long enough for the Commander to lose his iron glad grip on all Inquisition administration, which probably would fall to pieces if people didn't check in with him every five minutes, or something. When they turned towards where the horses were all stationed, Ellana leaned over and muttered in elvhen, “ _so, which one of them are you bedding, then?_ ”

Asha nearly choked, utterly mortified. “ _Solas can speak elvhen too - and none of them, you absolute heathen!_ ” she hissed back, glad it was dark.

“ _That lady seemed very friendly._ ”

“ _That’s because ‘that lady’ happens to be a friend!_ ”

" _She's very... muscly. That was very much your thing, back in the day._ "

“ _Is this the way it’s going to be from now? Secret conversations that unnerve everyone who overhears them?_ ” Solas interjected, sounding mildly intrigued.

“ _By the Creators, you have an impeccable accent! Tell me, Solas_ ,” Ellana said, with an evil glint in her eye, “ _has my sister told you quite how much she enjoys the company of those who share her same… passion for our language?_ ”

“Oh my gods!” Asha switched back to Common and stomped over to Buttons. “Ellana, get on the horse.”

El laughed gleefully, in that way that only younger sisters could. She sauntered over, a picture of innocence, and then reached up to scritch Buttons’ ears. “It seems there’s someone else to which I need to be introduced. What’s her name?”

Asha winced, before admitting, “...Buttons.”

‘“Buttons’?..." Ellana cast her an unimpressed glance, "...that’s it? That’s your, um, war-horse's name?”

“...Maybe so.”

“It’s because her eyes look like Buttons, isn’t it?” Ellana said, leaning in to stroke the horse’s soft muzzle. She looked back to her sister, giving a lopsided smile, "fuck me, Ash. With all the Creators as my witness, you haven’t changed _one bit_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All Elvish is taken from Project Elvhen! (fenxshiral)
> 
> Da'lath'in: little heart (*cries*)  
> Asa'ma'lin: sister (*cries harder*)  
> Ar lath ma, vhenan: 'I love you, my heart' (it was kind of awesome to use this platonically, not going to lie)
> 
> Hey everyone! Thank you for being patient during my mini-hiatus! I have three chapters to post this weekend to make up for it (mostly because the chapters after this one are essentially one chapter that I split into two because things were getting stupidly long). As always, thoughts/feelings/comments are welcome. I'm so very excited to introduce Ellana into the mix! :)


	50. Chapter Fifty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A victory feast at Skyhold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: alcohol

“Y'know, I’m suddenly seeing the benefits of worshipping Andraste,” Ellana mused aloud, as she ran her fingers through the many, many clothes in Asha’s armoire.

“Tell me about it,” Asha said. She was stretched out on her bed and trying not to let the blissful luxury of _pillows_ pull her down into an unwilling doze. They’d returned to Skyhold this morning, to find preparations were already underway for a feast to celebrate their victory. While Asha might have wanted a few sleeps between her and a party under other circumstances, the prospect of getting ready with Ellana, like it was a solstice festival and they were weaving garlands for each other’s hair, meant she was beyond excited.

No. More than that. Asha was _happy_.

Ellana had been back with her for over a week now, and sometimes she still had to poke her sister to convince herself that her brain wasn’t compensating for her time in Nightmare by delivering a lovingly crafted delusion. Her sister. Alive. Unharmed. Next to her. 

El seemed to be taking everything in her stride, from the anchor to Asha’s friends to joining a route march across the countryside with an army dedicated to Andraste. She even cheered from the sidelines when Asha closed a wayward rift on the journey, which was so distracting that Asha nearly got her head bitten off by a piddly little Shade. 

With the promise of the hot baths and comfortable beds awaiting them in Skyhold, people had begun to feel a lot more jovial. All her friends had been so excited to discover that _not every member_ of Asha’s family had been brutally murdered, and people warmed to Ellana immediately. Everyone always did. Sera was ecstatic to discover there was a much more irreverent (or ‘less elfy’) version of the Inquisitor who had already participated in three pranks, and Varric was always ready for a new audience to his tales - though Asha was surprised to discover the ones he was telling her sister were about _her_ , not Hawke. Perhaps the most shocking to everyone, Asha included, was the incredibly cordial conversation Ellana held with Madame de Fer, after a single compliment over her horned headdress resulted in an in-depth discussion of the current state of Orlesian politics. Ellana wanted to know everything about how the War of the Lions started.

The only person who seemed a little standoffish with El was actually Cullen. Asha might have been imagining it, but he seemed to keep a good fifteen feet between them whenever they were travelling on horseback. Which meant he was avoiding _Asha_ too, as she hadn't left her sister’s side. It felt… weird. She supposed she didn’t technically _need_ Cullen to like her sister - she knew they weren’t exactly close - but she thought they’d become friends. It felt strange that he wasn’t as happy as everyone else was over El’s existence. People - men especially - usually _loved_ Ellana.

Not that El was exactly the same girl who’d gotten twelve proposals before she turned nineteen. She was still beautiful, even without her long princess hair, but she was more subdued now, more businesslike. Asha was surprised to learn that she’d ended up as a hunter, despite never having trained for it in early life. It seemed like hardship in the Exalted Plains had required her to be a fast learner.

“Can I wear this one?” Ellana asked, startling her out of her thoughts. She pulled out a rose pink gown with an off-shoulder neckline and an embroidered floral design in gold threads on the sleeves. “The way you’re tanned right now, this is very much not your colour.”

“Um… I’m not sure it’s that fancy a party?” Asha looked at the satin dubiously. She had been planning to show up to the banquet in breeches and a clean shirt, which felt like the very height of sophistication after months between three sets of clothes and the same set of armour.

“It is if we make it so,” El said with certainty, hanging her chosen outfit on the door. “You have got to wear a dress, Asha, if you want a chance with that fancy-pants ambassador.”

Asha rolled her eyes at the ceiling. The general hotness that pervaded the Inquisition had not gone unnoticed, or uncommented on, for more than about thirty seconds. When El crawled out of Asha’s tent the morning after she’d joined the camp, her eyes had bugged out of her head the moment she was first blessed with Cullen Rutherford in full daylight: sun-bleached blonde hair, desert tan, a week’s worth of stubble and all. Asha had politely asked her to stop drooling in elvhen, but things only got worse when her sister met Dorian, and then Bull, and every single member of his Chargers. Asha’s first sparring session with Cassandra had earned her several comments that she pointedly ignored.

A note had been sent ahead of their arrival explaining the situation - Asha had actually written it, in what she hoped was simple but ultimately seamless Common - which meant that both Leliana and Josephine had met them at the gates. When Josie greeted Asha’s long-lost sister immediately with an excited hug and an “ _andaran atish’an_ ” in that gorgeous voice of hers, Ellana had given her a very pointed look of _how are you able to even speak to her?_

Of course, Asha was the last person who could blame Ellana for finding every Inquisition employee attractive. But this had triggered another facet to Ellana’s personality that had plagued Asha’s teenage years - her matchmaking. When you were an awkward fool who couldn’t speak to someone you fancied without tripping over your own sentences, having a beautiful, outgoing sister with an enthusiastic agenda quickly became the bane of your existence. Particularly when the people she was setting you up with often fancied her, not you.

“I’m telling you, Josie is really just that nice to everybody.”

“She got you chocolates.”

“I’m pretty certain that if anyone turned up on Skyhold’s doorstep, even not having won a war and found their missing sister, she’d give them chocolates.”

“Whatever you say…”

Truthfully, it was hard to feel anything other than mild annoyance, and even that annoyance had a honeyed edge. She couldn’t believe she was really here, no longer tranquil, feeling annoyed and arguing with the sister she'd thought was dead.

In the end, she acquiesced to her sister's every demand. Ellana insisted on having hot water drawn and delivered to the Inquisitor’s rooms along with a brass bathtub by the staff, complete with a fancy privacy screen. She rummaged through a box Asha hadn’t noticed in the bottom of her wardrobe, found scented soaps and cosmetics. After they’d both washed away the weeks of grime from travel - Asha had to admit, then, that maybe a scented private bath wasn’t the _worst_ fate a sister could bestow - she plaited Asha’s wet hair, and then pinned the waves into a half-up design that accentuated the undercut she reshaved for her. Feeling nostalgic, Asha plaited El’s short hair in a crown around her head, remembering the days when she’d had to wrestle with literal fistfuls of heavy curls.

Ellana also chose her dress. It was a deep sapphire blue, with short flared sleeves of sheer ruffled fabric, and a high-collared neckline that dipped into a small keyhole over her breastbone. A pattern of flowers was picked out in silver and blue beaded across the centre of the waist. It was understated compared to other parts of the armoire that Asha had not yet dared to delve into, but still one look it told Asha it was the most expensive thing clothing she’d ever worn outside of armour. And, because Ellana was a genius in all things aesthetic, it was absolutely perfect, accentuating the athletic figure she’d finally acquired in the same way that the bell-skirt and low neckline of her sister’s own gown turned her curves sinful.

Asha stood in front of the mirror next to El, heart aching at the familiar echo of their teenage routine. In their outfits they looked wildly different from each other, as they always had. She wasn't tall, but Ellana was somehow dainty, all cream skin, curls, and curves. Whereas Asha was now a pleasing array of sturdy flat-angles, sun-kissed and freckled to the point of distraction. But they also had the same faces, the same bright coppery hair, and when Ellana’s reflection beamed at her in the mirror, she had to admit they looked amazing.

“This is so stupid,” she said, lodging one more weak protest, mostly for the sake of it. “They’re going to see the Herald of Andraste gowned up and then be scared that they’re all wildly under-dressed.”

“I knew you would say that, you monster,” Ellana replied, moving to rummage amongst the pile of travel luggage she’d dropped in the corner. “Which is why I bought _this_.”

She triumphantly plucked out a large bottle of Golden Scythe spirit. Asha had a moment to worry about its origins before Ellana announced, “food isn’t being served for an hour. We are going to take however many shots of this you need to you stop being such a coward about your beautiful dress, and then we will be fashionably late to your own gods-damned party.”

It wasn’t perhaps the _best_ advice. But Asha found herself following it anyway.

“I think I can die happy,” Ellana sighed, as she sipped from her glass and surveyed the hall of people. 

Asha mumbled her agreement, closing her eyes as she finished a final mouthful of honeyed pastry, and then shamelessly licked every finger clean. After weeks of rations and whatever game the army could find, she felt like she’d ascended to some other plane of existence. And there was enough alcohol in her system to prevent her from being unnerved by the fact she was sat right at the centre of the head table, in her fancy gown, like the ruler of her own small kingdom of really, amazingly good food.

Her dress actually wasn’t out of place with the atmosphere that pervaded over the room. Most of the soldiers were in their crisp dress uniforms, and the civilians also wore their best clothes. Vivienne’s outfit was so sparkly that the person next to her was squinting slightly. When Asha and Ellana had stumbled out of her quarters (which she’d kind of forgot opened directly out onto the hall in question) they’d nearly tumbled into a concerned Josephine, who’d been about to go looking for them. The ambassador had taken in Asha’s appearance with wide-eyed shock and then delight, beginning a string of effusive compliments while Asha tried to ignore the pointed stare that Ellana was burning into the side of her head.

“I’m just so happy,” Asha announced loudly to the air. She turned and hugged her sister around her neck, while Ellana squawked and tried to stop the movement spilling her wine. “I love you so much. You know this, right? I know you’re the perfect sister and _everyone_ loves you, but I love you the most. You can’t ever, ever forget that.”

“Oh, wow,” Ellana murmured, “your moonshine days are over, huh?”

“Never ever ever. No one will ever love you as much as I do. From this day forward, all your suitors will have to duel me for the right to your hand. And remember. I have a magic sword.”

“Ash-”

“Not that you can’t take care of yourself! You are so amazing. Have I told you you’re amazing? I love those new knives. So pointy.”

“Um, excuse me?” Ellana said warily to someone over Asha’s shoulder, “my sister doesn’t have to give a speech, right? Because as much as I would treasure those memories for all of time, you might want to… not let her do that.”

“Duly noted.” came the voice of Cullen Rutherford, who was two seats down. 

“Luckily, I don’t think the ambassador had any speeches planned,” Leliana added, wryly amused.

“Oh goodness,” Josie whispered, “I didn’t think the wine was that strong. I let her have a fourth glass.”

“Um… we kind of had half a bottle of Golden Scythe, ahead of time.”

“ _Golden Scythe?_ ” that was Cullen’s voice again, this time very alarmed.

“Half... _each_.”

“Maker’s breath. A bottle is brewed... to be shared among _battalions_ you realise?”

“Hey!” Asha span unsteadily in her seat, as Ellana yelped and hurriedly shushed her. Properly shushed, she whispered down the line of the table at the Commander, “don’t you be mean to my sister.”

Before Cullen could respond, Ellana put a hand on her arm, “Ash, he’s not being mean to me. He is simply expressing some very, very realistic concerns.”

“Well, that’s good. Because you have done nothing wrong in your life, ever,” Asha smiled at Ellana, patting her hand, and then turned that smile full-beam at all three of her advisors. “Isn’t my sister absolutely perfect? She’s so pretty. I love her so much. I’m so happy.”

The three of them kind of blinked at her in shock. Then she glanced down at Cullen’s plate and saw that he’d left a whole pastry there. “Are you eating that?” she asked, genuinely concerned to find that he was one of those strange kind of people who could leave dessert untouched. “It’s really good.”

“Um… no,” he said carefully, his voice a little unsteady. “You can have it, Inquisitor.”

“Um, well, actually-” Josie started, but Asha cut off her inevitable lecture on etiquette by leaning across, plucking it off his plate, and popping it into her mouth whole.

“So... good...” she murmured, giving him a grateful smile even though her mouth was full. “You’re all so nice. I’m so glad we’re friends.”

“I just wanted it stated for the record,” Ellana said while Asha chewed and hummed in delight, brushing sticky crumbs of her face, “that she used to handle her liquor way better than this.”

At the end of the meal, it was Josephine who stood up and announced to Skyhold’s residents that they could move down to the lower courtyard and the Herald’s Rest, where a band was set up for dancing and the tavern ready for general revelry. The wine decanter had mysteriously passed Asha a few times without her goblet refilling, but once the formalities were dropped and she ran over to where Varric, Bull, and the Chargers were sitting, she found that they luckily had some left.

“Damn, Boss,” Bull said, with an appreciative leer at her wonderful dress. “You’re looking _pretty_ fine.”

“I know, but don’t say that, because I will spin, and then things will go wrong,” she grinned, as he filled up her glass.

“I picked that dress out, you know,” Dorian said from one table over, turning in his seat to admire her, “I have to say, I have such excellent taste. Many people will curse my name in the years to come, for the monster I have quite clearly created, and the broken hearts she’ll leave in her wake.”

Asha had been halfway through downing her new glass of wine, so was worried she’d not quite followed the conversation. “Are you talking about Ellana?”

“No, I’m talking about you. After this abrupt transformation, I’ll wager half the people here are wondering if you were possessed by a desire demon on your brief sojourn to the Fade.”

“Oh,” Asha rumpled her nose for a second. “Don’t be silly. There were no desire demons. Ellana did this. Ellana is here. And Ellana is perfect.”

“Yes, well, my regards to your perfect sister, then,” Dorian grinned.

As if summoned, Ellana appeared at Asha’s side, plucking the empty wine glass from her hand. “Less talking, _definitely_ less drinking, and more dancing!” 

“I wasn’t aware the Inquisitor danced,” said Cassandra, from somewhere at the back of the group as they made their way down the steps. Half the hall had already emptied out, and the first chords of music were being struck up by the band.

Had Asha ever noticed how ridiculous steep these steps were before? _Weren’t people concerned?_ It seemed like it might be a safety hazard. Halfway down, she halted abruptly, and removed the heeled shoes Ellana had forced her into. She heard a frustrated and surprised huff of breath from whomever had been forced to halt behind her.

“Fuck! Sorry!” she said, turning her head to find Solas there. He must’ve been at the table with Dorian, but she hadn’t noticed him. Unlike everyone else who'd dressed up, he was just wearing a cleaner version of what he always wore. She grinned up at him, waving, “Oh! Hello! You came to my party, this time.”

“And you got very drunk again, I see.”

“Rude!”

“We can only pray that you don’t end up passing out in the library.”

“Why would that be bad? I am _a joy_ to be around.” 

Solas chuckled, “I fear for the fate of Skyhold’s decorative porcelain, if nothing else.”

“Well, I have _quarters_ now,” Asha said, then bit her lip, realising that such a boast could probably be interpreted as flirting. She hastily qualified, “with its own ornaments. So the library’s vases are safe from me.”

Solas’ expression did that annoying thing where it softened, like he knew exactly what she'd been thinking. “You look beautiful, _lethallan_.”

“I know." Weirdly, the compliment didn’t strike any kind of feeling in her. She guessed that might be because she wasn’t an idiot - adding makeup and a dress to someone who’d already seemed kissable in a cursed bog probably _did_ improve things. 

Then, the alcohol in her system seemed to make something terrible happen. She reached up, tapped him on his nose, and added, “your loss!”

With a hasty wink, and her much more steady bare feet, she flew down the final steps to catch up with Ellana, waiting for her in the courtyard. “ _Really, him?_ ” her sister asked, in Nevarran. “ _He really doesn’t seem like your type. Where’s his hair?! And isn’t he a little… old for you?_ ” 

“Cassandra speaks Nevarran,” Asha informed El bluntly, in Common, which earned looks from everyone in the party, Cassandra included. “Please stop trying to drag me into secret conversations about my love life.”

“Oh my gods,” Ellana muttered, taking her by both shoulders and shunting her forward while the sniggers started, “this dress is _wasted_ on you. You are a lost cause.”

It was reaching summer in Skyhold, and that meant it was still light even at this hour. Coloured mage lights wrere strung across the edges of the courtyard and between the market stalls that now held drinks and more cakes, alongside trinket stands, creating the air of an impromptu festival. Clearly, vendors wanted to take advantage of soldiers just returned from the brink of death, who had also received their first paycheck in nearly two months. The first song from the band had already begun, and Asha watched from the sidelines as couples hastily formed lines and began to dance.

“Oh, I don’t know these dances,” Ellana said. 

“I know,” Asha replied glumly. “Stupid _shem_.”

“Guess we’ll have to show them how it’s done,” El grinned, extending out her hand. Asha looked down for a second in tipsy confusion, before realising -

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.”

“What’s the problem?” Varric asked, mildly interested. The rest of her friends had caught up and were clearly waiting to see what drunk Asha would do next, with varying degrees of amusement and concern.

“When we were taught how to dance, Ash insisted on learning all the men’s parts as well,” Ellana confided with a wicked grin, “so she could whisk innocent girls without partners onto the dancefloor, and steal their hearts.”

“Lavellan had more girls than boys! I-it just made sense!”

“A likely story, heartbreaker,” her sister said with a wink. “C’mon - I can’t believe these people haven’t seen you dance!”

“That’s because no one else knows the - _Fen’harel ver na_ you are the worst-”

Ellana grinned, dragging at her arm, and Asha had just enough time to shove her shoes hastily to Cassandra before she was pulled out into the clearing. Ellana straightened Asha’s slightly wonky collar, as the first notes of the second, _much faster_ song began to play. Asha wondered if she should be self-conscious, the Herald of Andraste in front of the entire Inquisition, but she was too drunk to do anything other than grin as Ellana held her arms out and they took the conventional hold. If you ignored the crowds and the way the anchor sparked, it was exactly the same as when they danced together as children, with Ellana stood on the tops of Asha’s feet as they play-acted a festival. Of course, it was only conventional in the Dalish sense. Very few human dances involved a close hold, apart from some Orlesian ones - because honestly, nearly everything Orlesian had its routes in Dalish culture, deep down, because that’s how empires worked who conquered massive swathes of Dalish territory _worked_. 

Ellana had been careful to position them both away from the more regimented rows of paired dancers. They stood on the outskirts of the dance floor with th children and groups of friends. When the music began in earnest, they had plenty of space to start spiralling in a quickstep pattern, skipping in a wide circle.

The dance was a fast one, with lots of complex turns and several spins as Ellana ducked under the high arch of her arm in a turn and then back through again, repeatedly. “Oh my gods, I’m so drunk,” Asha muttered, as she tried to remember the steps from three years ago fast enough to lead, and steered El out of unsuspecting people’s way. And then she laughed, because it was so _fun_ , her dress getting tangled in her legs, her pins falling from her hair, the world a dizzy blur around her as her heart pounded.

Ellana broke step in the dance to spin Asha, which went terribly, because Ellana was tiny and ducking under her arm was _hard_. “Hey! I’m supposed to be leading!”

“Who cares, no one else here is Dalish!” El yelled back over the music. “They don’t know it’s wrong!”

They came back together and Asha span Ellana away before recapturing her hand and tugging her back into the hold, dipping her to the side and then using the momentum to whirl them in a three point turn. “ _I_ know it's wrong” she hissed, “you'll throw me off!”

“Don’t you want some pretty Inquisition soldier to notice you?”

“No! I want to dance with my sister, you moron.”

They kept going through that song and then the next and the next and the next, until Asha was breathless and her arms ached from steering Ellana away from bystanders. When she paused for breath, she was unsurprised when a sweet-looking elven boy was almost immediately at Ellana’s elbow, asking if she could teach him the steps. He was a little too young for El, but he had a vallaslin on his face, and her sister seemingly pitied the elf who’d never learnt a Dalish dance. Asha bowed out of the circle, and went off in search of Cassandra and her shoes

The Seeker was sat on one of the walls with Cullen, both looking very dapper in their dress uniforms and sipping from new drinks as they watched the dancers. Asha waved as she wandered over. She held out her hand, hoping to get her own glass of wine and instead simply getting her shoes. Looking down, she saw her feet were now dusty and green with grass stains, under the hem of her elegant gown. With a shrug, she hopped onto the wall next to them and watched Ellana lead the boy in a fumbling circle while he stammered and blushed.

“And she calls me a heartbreaker,” she said, with a fond smile.

“I think he didn’t dare approach the Herald of Andraste with such a request,” Cass pointed out.

“Glowing hand or not, I refuse to admit I’m too intimidating to dance with.”

“Five weeks ago, you literally killed a greater demon,” Cassandra said.

“Have you _seen_ the dress you’re wearing?” Cullen asked, at the same time. Both women turned to look at him, unimpressed, and he blushed, tips of his ears going red. “I’m merely in agreement that she looks _very_ intimidating.”

Asha plucked at the beading at the front, frowning, “but I chose one of the plainer ones.”

Cassandra took a sidelong glance at Cullen, and for some reason, laughed. It was uncharacteristically loud for her, and after a quick examination of the Seeker’s flushed cheeks, Asha realised Cass was tipsier than she’d ever seen her. “And for that, we thank you, Inquisitor,” the Seeker teased. Maybe she was too drunk, or maybe Asha was, but she didn’t quite get the joke.

“You guys should dance!” she scolded them, “you actually know these stupid Fereldan dances.”

“We’re perfectly fine here, thank you, Inquisitor,” Cullen said flatly, taking another sip of his ale and looking like he very much needed it.

“I’m just saying, if I could dance your silly pair dances with their orderly rows and five foot decorum barriers, I wouldn’t be standing on the sidelines when there are people in need of partners.”

“Someone could teach you,” Cassandra offered. She sighed, theatrically, “in fact, I suppose _someone_ will have to suffer to take the task upon themselves, for the sake of your deportment at Halamshiral. Some would perhaps say it was an act of duty.”

“Hey! I’m a wonderful dancer.”

“If only there was _someone_ ,” Cassandra continued, seemingly to the air, “amongst our number, who would love to have a ready excuse to dance with you, instead of having to watch you resort to partnering your sister, because their courage mysteriously failed them!”

“Hey! Ellana is _also_ a wonderful dancer.” As if to punctuate the statement, Ellana finished her dance with the boy with a twirl and a curtsy, and then started to make her way over to the three of them. Asha looked to Cassandra, “can she learn too?”

Ellana frowned by Asha’s side, “what can I learn too?”

“I should go.” Cullen said abruptly, pushing off the wall. “I was hoping to speak to Leliana, and see if she has had any word from those already has stationed at Weisshaupt.”

“Does that really have to be _right now_?” Cass said, sounding exasperated.

“Leliana already has spies in Weisshaupt?" Asha said. " _How?!_ ”

“My apologies, Inquisitor,” Cullen said with a quick bow, and then he started making his way across the courtyard.

Cassandra groaned, loudly. “That man is _impossible_ ,” she proclaimed, before downing the rest of her drink.

Normally, Asha would’ve immediately agreed, and possibly added _‘and allergic to fun’_. But something concerning his behaviour was niggling at her. Yes, workaholic Cullen was nothing new, but why was it only when Ellana turned up that he fled? 

“Give me a moment,” she said, handing her shoes off to Ellana this time. Then, she picked up her skirts and hurried after him.

“What’s going on?” she heard Ellana ask Cassandra behind her.

Cassandra slammed her cup down with a grunt, “Perhaps you can tell me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, I realised how long it was probably going to take me to get to Halamshiral, so I shamelessly decided to add an extra ball (with extra ballgowns). Enjoy my adorable self-indulgent chapter of happy Asha content. I swear, whenever I get writer's block I just hand give her some alcohol and see what happens.
> 
> Author's notes for the chapter:
> 
> The Codex entry on Golden Scythe 4.90 Black, for anyone who's interested, says: "Optimal serving is by the drop. Contact with exposed flesh is discouraged, but likely inevitable." So yeah. Asha is shitfaced. 
> 
> I spent a long time trying to work out if Cass would be the kind of drunk who would tease Cullen, and then decided, absolutely - if she is also the kind of drunk to punch you in bouts of high disapproval.
> 
> And, yes. I have now made it canon that Inquisitor Lavellan booped the great Dread Wolf's snoot.


	51. Chapter Fifty-One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha and Cullen have a heart to heart.

Cullen cursed himself as he walked away. 

He was an idiot.

He needed to get this under control, he shouldn’t dare think -

Suddenly, he felt a tug on sleeve that bought him up short. He’d been about to walk blindly into the tavern - not necessarily to find Leliana, but at least to find safer company, or perhaps covertly use the escape route at the top of the building to retreat to his office. Turning around, he couldn’t hide his surprise to find Asha standing by his shoulder.

She looked beautiful, of course. That went without saying, even without noting the makeup or the dress that carved a powerful, night-blue silhouette. After months in the desert, her red hair was now threaded through with strands of brighter sun-bleached strawberry blonde, and her entire face was warm and spattered with even more freckles than when they’d left. 

“Can we talk for a second?” she asked, looking up at him. Her eyes wandered from his face slightly and she fought to snap her gaze back to him, but she wasn’t slurring as badly as she had during dinner. After a moment, as if she’d just gauged her own level of drunkenness, she added, “I promise it’s not about cats.”

“Um… of course, Inquisitor,” he said, unable to find a reasonable excuse to deny her request. His hasty retreat had been stopped. He could still feel his hand on her arm and was trying not to focus on it. 

The Inquisitor glanced around, spotted a quiet space under an archway by one of Skyhold’s walls, and pulled him over that way with no small amount of force. He spent their journey trying to school his face to indifference. Such exercises had gotten more difficult - it was all frankly mortifying, at this point. He hardly relished feeling like a stuttering school boy again - it had been bad enough the first time round. 

That wasn’t what she wanted to talk to him about... right? No matter how many other people noticed his failed attempts at professionalism, the Inquisitor seemed to remain blissfully oblivious, which was his only solace.

 _And a testament to just how pointless these feelings are,_ he thought, another reprimand at his own failing self-discipline as he wrestled to get this futile infatuation under control. Asha hadn’t noticed anything because attraction between them would never occur to her even as a prospect. He was a _templar_. She’d be disgusted if she knew.

His heart was in his mouth when they finally came to a stop in the relative privacy of the alcove, but he was reasonably certain none of it showed on his face - at least to someone as drunk as the Inquisitor. “What was it you needed to discuss?” he asked, eager to get the whole thing over with. If he was going to have to suffer the mortifying ordeal of telling her he already knew it was all hopeless, he’d rather it be over with.

“Why are you avoiding my sister?”

Cullen opened his mouth to speak, stopped, and sucked in a quick breath. _Ah_. That wasn’t really what he’d expected.

“I know it’s stupid,” Asha was saying, rubbing her forehead, “I’m not saying you have to like her - though why wouldn’t you like her? Ellana’s amazing! But why do you keep avoiding her? What could she have possibly done that means you leave as soon as she arrives anywhere? You’ve barely spoken to her. And she’s amazing!”

“Inquisitor-”

“Isn’t it a good thing that she’s here? Lavellan isn’t gone! Technically speaking, I have a clan. A clan of two people. You should talk to my clan!” Asha looked up at him, “I think you’d really like her. Everyone likes Ellana-”

“Asha, please stop talking,” he put a hand on her shoulder and, miraculously, it actually worked. The Inquisitor fell silent. That might be the first time that had ever happened. He let go, and continued, “I promise you, I have no problem with your sister. She does indeed seem like a lovely person, and I’m very, very happy for you now that you’ve found her.”

“...Then why don’t you like being around her?”

Cullen closed his eyes briefly, letting out a sigh. In his mind’s eye, he saw the scene from a week ago, in the Dales. Asha as she sobbed and clung to her newly rediscovered family, barely able to stutter out full sentences as she divulged the horrible events that had led to their separation. _They did something to me, Ellana. That day. Some magic, something evil, it made me - I - I went away for a long time..._

Asha never talked about her tranquility. Sometimes, it was hard to even remember she’d ever _been_ tranquil, when she smiled and laughed and ranted and railed. It had hit him then, exactly what had been done to her, what _templars_ had done to her, and how truly cruel it was.

“I have no problem being around your sister, Asha,” he said, “but... that doesn’t mean your sister will want to be around _me_.”

“Oh.”

Asha blinked in surprise, the Commander’s answer doing something to cut through the haze of drink. Quickly, she reviewed what had happened over the last few days: of Cullen carefully placing distance between himself, her, and Ellana whenever they came inadvertently too close, and trying to make it seem like it wasn’t deliberate or a big deal. It was exactly what she had requested from him when she’d first arrived in Haven.

“I know that we are… colleagues now,” he was saying, “if not… friends. You have graciously allowed me to work with you, despite your history with the Order. But Ellana has given me no such permission, and I didn’t want to presume. I thought it best to maintain a distance from her until you had time to discuss her feelings about my… uh… connections. My past. The Order.”

“So... you _have_ been avoiding Ellana. But it’s because you’re worried that she won’t like the fact that you’re a temp- _former_ templar?”

He nodded, before awkwardly running a hand through his hair.

“Oh,” Asha said again. There was an awkward silence for a second, before drink got the better of her, and she said. “Well, good.”

His expression fell, but in a way where it was clear he hadn’t expected her to say anything else.

“Not that I’m…” she sighed, pushing the pins in her hair back into place as she struggled to find the correct words to convey what she wanted to say. “That is… I was worried you had something against _her_. But you’re actually completely right. I haven’t even told her yet. And I should, before you guys interact. I mean, _I_ know and I’m ok with it now, but that doesn’t mean I should assume that she would be too. You’re right - she might not want anything to do with you. Gods, sorry, that’s probably a bit blunt.”

“Maker’s breath, please don’t apologise-”

“Then, thank you,” she tucked some hair behind her ear and continued. “That’s… really kind, Cullen. Terribly communicated, if I’m honest. You kind of just keep walking off. But also very thoughtful. Thank you.”

“Inquisitor, please don’t thank me,” he said, and there was actually a note of pleading in his voice. He looked down at the ground. “It is probably, quite literally, the least I could do.”

“Um… are you… ok?”

“Why would you even ask me that?” 

“Because it seems like the answer is… no?”

He sighed. It was a long, long sigh, even by Cullen’s standards. He hadn’t even sighed that long when she'd asked the advisors off-hand if the Inquisition could get involved with combating the darkspawn along the Storm Coast. Then, he seemed to come to some kind of a decision. 

“Inquisitor. I wasn’t planning on saying this now, and by the Maker I hope you have a chance of even remembering it but... meeting your sister, seeing _you_ meet your sister… I’d read the reports on the Clan Lavellan massacre, of course I had, but I’d… I’d never really considered…” he paused, looking frustrated with himself, and started his speech again. “I’m sorry. For what I was like. When we first met. For ever posing the templars as an option for an alliance when you had a stake in that decision. For being, quite frankly, an ass.”

Asha blinked, as the longest speech Cullen Rutherford had ever given her continued tumbling out of him, like a dam had burst somewhere inside his chest. “I saw what the Order was capable of in Kirkwall and was horrified by it, but even as I fought to stop them, I never appreciated that I was still ultimately just a spectator. I am not the one who will ever have to be afraid when I face a member - or former member - of the Order. Their bloodlust has never, nor will it ever be, directed in its full force at me. I will never fully appreciate what mages like you have suffered. I have, at points in my life, been a perpetrator of that suffering. And when I did finally see what was wrong, I left, rather than try to reform or change what remained. I can tell myself that the people who hurt you were not true templars, or they were perverting our cause; but the Red Templar army and the current state of Thedas hardly supports that interpretation of events. Clearly, corruption lay right in the very roots of our organisation, and you suffered at its hands. And I’m sorry for thinking any of my pointless arguments would ever be enough to erase the pain of what you and your sister went through, when it was caused by people who were raised like me, and who wield the same powers I once did.

“I was hoping to use the Inquisition as a means of redeeming the Order, and it was a selfish hope, one that ignored your own suffering, which far outweighs my own.” He looked at her, took a deep breath, and said, “as a templar, I wish to formally apologise for the Clan Lavellan massacre, and as the Commander of the Inquisition, I promise that we will bring its perpetrators to justice.”

When he finished talking, the cheers and reverly and music that filled the silence brought Asha back to the present.

“Um, wow.” She said. “You were right. That was _a lot_. To take in. When drunk. Wow.”

He dared to give her one small, tired smile, “I could offer it to you in writing?”

“Honestly? Not your worst plan...” she felt herself rubbing her own temple, now just as weary as he seemed to be. More than anything, she needed another drink. “Look,” she said, flatly, “I can’t forgive you.” 

As his face immediately fell she hastily shrieked, “fuck! No, not that way! Shit! Balls! It’s more that... you just didn’t actually do the thing so… it’s not like I can hold you accountable. Whatever guilt you might be feeling, it’s your own, and you’ll have to deal with it yourself. However you see fit. But obviously, I'm glad you are sorry for what happened to Ellana and me. And I agree with you: the templars are quite shit.” 

He let out a short, incredulous chuckle, while she huffed, forcing herself to coherency, “and you know my opinions on all of the fuckery that goes on in Circles in general, and how I think we both have kind of a fucked-up deal. And then there’s all the templars that must have gotten turned to red lyrium against their will… it’s all horrifying, really. I can’t make it better, Cullen, I’m sorry. But thank you. That was a very nice speech.”

“I know that it’s completely inadequate…”

“No. I mean it. It was nice to hear. It makes me trust you more,” she gave him what she hoped was a peaceable smile, “and you’re right, you were an ass, at the beginning. So that one, you can definitely apologise for.”

“I apologise, Inquisitor, for being an ass,” he said, in an utterly serious deadpan.

“Your apology, Commander Rutherford, is accepted.” she said, holding out her hand to him. He looked down at it for a second, seemingly flustered, before reaching out to take it. “As your punishment,” she continued, while they shook on it, all business-like, “you will have to suffer me being a drunk fool, multiple times, over the course of the immeasurable future of our organisation. I might even make fun of your hobbies.”

He grinned - the untroubled, boyish version of his smile that she liked so much - and said, “agreed. It shall be my burden to bear.”

She smiled back. Teasing was easy, familiar ground, and something drunk-Asha was very good at. Listening to a man bear his soul… not so much.

“And Cullen,” she said, holding onto his hand for a second longer when he began to pull it back, “we _are_ friends. Just in case you were still uncertain, on that point. I’d rather not leave any doubt. I mean, I saved your life and everything! For fuck's sake!”

“Thank you, Inquisitor.”

“Asha.”

“...Asha.” he said, and it was only then that she dropped his hand, feeling strangely warm about the whole thing.

“So, are you really going to leave this party, or are you maybe going to do something really out of character and have some fun?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “Just because I know your reasons, doesn’t mean I’m going to let you go hide in your office, or whatever you were planning on doing.”

“Err…”

“I’ll keep Ellana occupied, so please don’t leave on our account. And I’ll talk to her tomorrow, so we can stop inconveniencing your infamously _flourishing_ social life.”

The look Cullen gave her was bordering on despairing. “I see that, when you said you were going to be making fun of me, you meant ‘effective immediately’.”

“I’m just begging you, literally _begging_ you, to have some fun,” she said, with utmost sincerity. “We’ve been on campaign _for months_. The reports can wait until tomorrow, Cullen, _please_. It’s practically an order, at this point. If I’m the only one late for whatever meetings we have tomorrow, it’s you lot who are all at fault.”

“Understood.” he smiled softly at her, “consider me thoroughly ordered.”

“I’d also recommend finding some Golden Scythe,” she added. “It’s _great_.”

If she’d tumbled out of the Inquisitor’s quarters at the start of the night, Asha found herself practically _crawling_ back up the stairs, as dawn leaked across the horizon. 

Her hair had tumbled completely out of its pins. Her feet were blackened with dirt, and they _ached_. The world refused to stay upright. When she’d returned to Ellana after speaking with Cullen, she’d found her sister talking with the Chargers. “I hear we’re finally dancing properly?” Dalish asked, handing Asha a bottle of brandy to swig from, before holding out her hand and sweeping her out onto the floor. Then Skinner had asked for a dance, although she was one of those people who was very reticent to be led. And then Bull said he was always looking for an excuse to sweep a beautiful redhead off their feet before taking Asha to the floor, while Dorian quipped from the sidelines and not-so-gradually got drunker and drunker, before demanding his own dances with everyone involved. At some point, she thought she remembered Josephine joining, and bashfully pointing out she knew the Orlesian and Antivan equivalents to these steps... "quite well?" 

Dance after dance blurred together and Asha was soon drunk enough again to forget she was very much barefooted as she stomped and jumped and span and laughed. And then it appeared she became drunk enough to forget other things, like exactly what she’d said to Vivienne when the woman came up and commented on her outfit. or to Blackwall when he’d politely asked Ellana “where she’d gotten that Golden Scythe, exactly?” and she’d watched Ellana give an elaborate explanation in the high-pitched tone of voice she remembered vividly from her childhood - the one that told you, immediately, that Ellana was lying. 

She certainly didn’t remember what she shouted at Cullen Rutherford, when she saw him on the battlements. She berated him from the courtyard until he proved that Captain Rylen was in fact stood up there with him with a bottle of whiskey, meaning that the Commander was not ending the night earlier than she’d ordered him to.

Then she blacked out for a while, and the next memory she had was of being sprawled on the floor amongst assorted cushions in Sera’s Herald’s Rest nook, while the more conscious amongst her friends played some kind of cardgame on the coffee table above her head.

“You’ve become a lightweight in your old age, _asa'ma'lin_ ,” El said affectionately, ruffling Ash'a hair as she then proceeded to bluff badly enough to lose all the gold Asha had given her. 

Gods? Was this happiness? It was bittersweet, as everything had been since she woke up with the anchor, but she thought this might be the closest she’d gotten yet. 

“ _Da’lath’in_ ,” she mumbled, as Ellana yanked her across the room and, with a grunt, dumped her on the bed. The room swayed around her. “'M so glad… you’re here.”

“Me too, Ash,” Ell sighed as she began to pluck out the silver pins that now just sat in her hair like twigs in a bird’s nest, rather than securing anything in place. 

“Thought I’d… lost you…”

“I know,” her sister said, smoothing back her hair. “You gonna be sick?”

“ _Mother and father,_ ” Asha murmured in elvhen, fighting against closing lids, “ _want me… to look after you._ ”

“You live in a castle, Ash. We’ll be fine.”

“ _Gone now. All gone._ ”

“Not all. Not everyone," Ellana told her, in that same, calm voice, tucking Asha’s body under the coverlet before she snuggled in on the other side and moved so she could tuck her chin down on Asha’s shoulder. “Your feet are fucking freezing, and completely gross, by the way.”

 _It’s like being back at home,_ Asha thought, and that was the last thing to enter her mind before she fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drunken shenanigans are at a close! I hope you enjoyed these last two chapters, which was my recovery from writing the Battle of Adamant! 
> 
> See everyone next week :) xx


	52. Chapter Fifty-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha acquires a new tutor.

“I think you need to swordfight with him.”

Asha looked up at Ellana from where she was lacing her boots, preparing to leave her quarters for her daily sparring session with Cassandra. “Excuse me?”

“You wanted to know if there was anything that would make me feel more comfortable around that Commander of yours. I think watching you beat him up would work.”

Asha snorted, “it’s really sweet of you to assume there’s even a _remote_ chance of that happening, if we ever fought.”

“Plus,” Ellana continued, squinting out of the window at the bright, early-summer sunshine that currently bathed Skyhold, “I think if you fought him for long enough in this weather, he’d probably have to take his shirt off. And I think, that seeing him shirtless? It would do _a lot_ to make me feel much, much more comfortable in his presence. So I’m saying, for my well being and peace of mind, as your only living relative and most beloved sister, you need to swordfight with him.”

Asha laughed. Ellana- her wonderfully shallow, shallow sister - really hadn’t changed. “You’re disgusting!”

“I’m sorry - _what_ about the idea of that man shirtless is disgusting?”

Not very much, if Asha was honest. Her mouth actually went dry at the prospect. “I imagine he was left with some pretty dire tan-lines, after the Western Approach,” she offered weakly.

“Do you know that half the castle staff go out to watch the army train every day, for _absolutely no reason_?"

“Then go with them, if you want to see Cullen shirtless! You don’t need me!”

“I’m just saying, as the leader of the Inquisition or whatever you are, it strikes me as very _odd_ that you never go survey your troops,” Ellana sighed. “If I were you, with your glowing hand thing, I’d be doing a _lot_ more surveying, just as part of my daily routine. Possibly with a spyglass. I’d be more than happy to help with this part of you Inquisitor duties, for the good of the cause. I could commission one from Dagna.”

“Look, I know you’re joking, but would it really help you to go meet with him?” Asha asked. She’d taken Cullen’s thoughts on Ellana’s boundaries around him pretty seriously, and discussed it with her sister once the hangover had worn off. Which, if she was honest, had taken several days. 

“...If I say yes, will you let me go gawp at your smoking hot Commander while he’s shirtless?”

“Ellana!”

“I’m just saying, he might once have been a templar, but he is still gorgeous _right now_.”

“You’re the worst!”

But despite Asha’s protests, they still, somehow, ended up walking towards the military training ground that had been established in the valley below Skyhold. After Asha had finished sparring with Cass, Ellana had insisted that she wanted to go see what instruction was available to the Inquisition Scouts. Although El wasn’t joining the army - Asha, rather hypocritically, wasn’t sure if she’d ever _let_ her - she didn’t want her skill with her blades getting sloppy. At least, that was the very convincing argument she made when the Seeker was present, while Asha just met her speech with a flat, unimpressed stare.

But Cassandra seemed to agree with her sister’s far-too-well-planned logic. As the three of them descended into the valley, Asha felt the temperature rise as the sun beat overhead and reflected off the melting snow, with not a little ominous dread. She really wished Ellana hadn’t started all this talk about _shirtless men_. Now it was all she could seem to think about, which was hardly professional.

“Have you really not visited the army?” Ellana asked.

“Not really,” Asha admitted with a shrug. Journeying to Adamant was the most time she’d ever spent with them. “I offer Cullen my thoughts in meetings, and then just kind of leave them to it. It’s not like I did any of that stuff in Lavellan either. What the fuck use am I to an army? I mean, I guess I could help teach the mages, but Fiona has that covered.”

“This actually relates to something I wanted to raise with you,” Cassandra said. “Your work at Adamant proves you are now more than capable of fighting in melee combat. I think I am running out of things to teach you.”

“You say that, like you don’t still beat me every time.”

“It is not a case of whether or not you need to defeat _me_ , but your enemies,” Cassandra delivered the boast with humble disinterest. “With the demon army fully vanquished, the priority becomes Samson and his forces. I am not fully acquainted with their techniques or how to combat them, especially now that you have Valour in play. As I said when we started this training, I think we might need to bring in someone else to help you prepare specifically for the Red Templar army. I’ve already discussed it with Cullen, in the meeting you - ah - missed.”

She was referring to the one that happened the day after the victory feast. Which Asha did not get out of bed for, having found herself only capable of travelling as far as the sick bucket at the side of her bed. 

“So, you’re saying my sister should find a templar to fight?” El said, with a sly sideways look, “did you hear that, _asa'ma'lin_?”

“ _Try to keep it in your pants, da’lath’in,_ ” Asha reprimanded in elvhen.

There _was_ actually a crowd surrounding the training ground at the front of the camp: servants and civilians and scouts, all watching as the soldiers trained in formation and new recruits sparred. Asha couldn’t help but feel vaguely affronted - people only ever seemed to crowd around her lessons with Cass when they got particularly embarrassing. Casting her eye across the field, she quickly ascertained that it was Rylen - who _was_ shirtless, sparring against twenty recruits each in turn as they practised their blocks and parries - who currently had the most admirers. The man had dark tattoos that extended beyond his face to the right side of his shoulder and torso. Ellana waggled her eyebrows at Asha meaningfully while she rolled her eyes.

Though the Rebel Mages trained mainly at the other end of the camp, Asha noticed a few individuals scattered amongst the soldiers, fighting against groups of varying sizes. One mage had summoned a massive, golem-like creature formed out of dark earth, that they puppeteered from the sidelines. After a quick inspection, Asha realised their creation mimicked the shape and movements of a red lyrium behemoth. As four trainees tried to hack away at its body, the construct raised one of its craggy arms and bought it up to slam down on a recruit, who didn’t roll out of the way in time.

“Bring your shield up!” came a shout, in a voice that she recognised as Cullen’s. The recruit, clearly panicked, instinctively followed the order as the golem’s limb came crashing down on top of them. It knocked them to their knees, but the angle of the shield meant that the momentum of the construct glanced off and its club arm thundered into the earth. It stumbled forward in what Asha had to admit was a convincing pantomime of the real thing.

“Now, you, attack!” On his command, another recruit rushed forward while the golem tried to dislodge its arm, and with a cry hacked through the thin joint at the elbow. Dirt streamed from the seams of the mage’s construct, and then the entire limb disintegrated.

“Remember, though a behemoth looks large, the process of creating one is typically done in the heat of battle. The construction is often crude and rushed. They concentrate the might into specific parts of their anatomy, which leaves the lyrium coating on the rest of the body brittle and weak,” Cullen’s voice continued. 

She finally spotted him: it seemed he was giving a lecture to another group of recruits as they watched the demonstration. Asha noticed that Ellana was right - a _lot_ of civilians seemed to take undue interest in how one might fell a behemoth. Several teenage girls - and, yes, she also noticed their mothers, who seemed in full support of their daughters’ pastime - were whispering at the back of the group while the recruits watched the fighters.

She grinned. Cullen Rutherford had a fan club, and he didn’t even need to be shirtless. It was kind of adorable.

“Commander, I need a moment,” said the mage at the back of the group, their voice strained. Cullen nodded, and the behemoth-puppet disintegrated entirely as the trainees stepped back from it. “We’ll reconvene in ten minutes,” the Commander announced to the group. He reached over to take a clipboard from his assistant, but stalled when he noticed their approach.

“That’s such an amazing idea!” Asha said, gesturing at the pile of dirt that would soon be a model behemoth again, “the dirt would even respond to winter spells the same as lyrium, too! Do you use it with the mages? Does it work? Who came up with it?” 

“Good afternoon, Inquisitor,” Cullen said with a small smile, “what brings you here?”

“Sorry! Hi! Ellana,” _allegedly_ , “wanted to come see what the scouts could teach her.”

“Most of Leliana’s people are currently running a survival exercise in the mountains to the north,” he informed her. “They should be back tomorrow.”

“Oh no!” El said, casting her eyes across the seas of half-dressed soldiers and lingering on Rylen’s form as he pushed another recruit to the dirt, “what a shame!”

Asha glared at the back of her head. 

“I’ve also told the Inquisitor about our plans for the next steps in her training.” Cassandra said. "She has agreed to make use of your expertise on templars.”

Oh, so he was going to be the instructor, then. “Are you sure you can train me? Will you have the time?” Asha asked.

At the same moment Cullen said, “well, not _my_ expertise, specifically-”

They both froze, looking at each other. 

“That is,” Cullen continued, awkwardly. “I agreed with Cassandra that this is the next logical step for you to take in terms of your teaching, and I’ve been thinking about candidates we could use as sparring partners. There are a few among our ranks that I think would be suitable. There’s Lisbeth, who was a Knight Vigilant in Val Royeaux, and Mara, who is retired - she was previously employed for the Starkhaven Circle, and trained templars for the last fifteen years of her appointment. Rylen is currently busy with our new recruits, as you can see. But if you were to wait roughly three weeks, he would be free for instruction as well.”

“Ok…?” Asha said, wondering if he somehow wanted her to choose. She wished her voice didn’t sound so shaky. While she knew in theory that she’d have to get used to fighting templars soon - given the sheer number of them that wanted to kill her, if nothing else - it became terrifying when they began to talk about it in practice. Thinking about fighting against one brought her out in a cold sweat.

“...Unless you have someone you’d prefer?” Cullen said, peering down at her face, which she imagined had gone rather pale.

“...No?” Asha squeaked, because she honestly didn’t. 

What did it matter which templar it was? It was still going to be harrowing, regardless.

“I could possibly…” Cullen hesitated, “I could make time to supervise the initial sessions, if you like? Cassandra could be there too. If it helped you feel safer? To make it… easier.”

“Why aren’t you teaching her?” Ellana asked bluntly.

“ _Ellana_ ,” Asha said, in warning. She knew how busy Cullen was - that’s why it was stupid to ever have assumed he’d agreed to be her tutor in the first place.

“I mean, if that is what the Inquisitor wants…” 

“I don’t mind,” Asha said quickly, surprised to find that her hurried denial felt forced. “I know your schedule is insane. I don’t want to be a burden. You’re already teaching so many people, it would be selfish of me to-”

“Well, _I_ want it to be him,” Ellana said.

Asha gave her a sharp, unimpressed look, not trusting her motives in the slightest. “Cullen is _busy_ , Ellana.” _Stop trying to find excuses to get him into a state of undress._

“Look, are you ok with the idea of fighting templars, even in a practice situation?” her sister demanded, “are you ok with them doing that Silence thing, after what happened to you?”

Asha didn’t say anything. Into the silence, Cullen said awkwardly, “well, actually, we’re not sure that red templars are even capable of Silencing. They seem instead to sow the ground with red lyrium-”

“If my sister insists on putting herself in these ridiculous situations to prove something to herself, then I need it to be with someone she trusts,” Ellana said. Asha noticed that her sister’s voice was actually completely level, not in that high pitched tone that signalled she was lying. Regardless of what petty ulterior motives she might have, what she was saying was the truth. She turned to Asha, “Ash - do you trust any of the other templars here?”

Asha shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. Other than Cullen and Cassandra, she hadn’t spoken to any of the templars in the Inquisition, beyond maybe twenty words to Rylen. “...No.”

“Then it should be him,” Ellana stated, with certainty.

“It might actually be… better, Commander, if it were you,” Cassandra added. “Given the current state of your powers, you are operating closer to a red templar,” she continued, lowering her voice. “Whereas others might instinctively go for Silence…”

Asha realised she was referring to the fact he was no longer taking lyrium. Like a red templar, he would be fighting her only with the martial techniques he’d learnt from his time in the Circles. And any magic he _did_ use would be weak.

“And… and you had absolutely _no reason_ not to mention this yesterday?” Cullen sputtered, looking like he was almost trapped. Asha felt sorry for him, and a little selfishly guilty at the relief she felt. She could only imagine the amount of reworking he’d have to do to his crazy schedule to accommodate teaching her as well.

“I had rather thought you’d be sensible enough to come to the conclusion yourself,” Cassandra replied, in an unimpressed voice. “ _Really,_ Cullen - Mara is almost sixty.”

“I mean…” Asha bit her lip, feeling guilty for even suggesting it in the first place. “Maybe you could do the first few lessons? And then… I could try one of the others you suggested? When I know what to expect?”

Cullen glanced at her face, and then away at the ground. His shoulders slumped slightly, defeated. 

“Of course, Inquisitor. I’ll make time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ellana Lavellan: doing the Creators' work, and getting the people what they want. (I promise she is a person, and not just a plot device!)
> 
> No author's note for this chapter, but I did want to let y'all know that I have another Dragon Age story up! [A Man's Word is His Bond](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25589389) is a DA:O Zevran/female warden soulmates AU! I'm currently uploading it, but it's a much shorter story, and also fully drafted! It will be updating steadily over the next few weeks, alongside this. So, if you like my writing, or Zevran/Warden, or soulmates AUs, or simply want your slowburn resolved in 20k rather than 200+k, feel free to check it out!
> 
> Super excited for tomorrow's chapter! See you then xx


	53. Chapter Fifty-Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sexy!! Sword!! Fight!!

Things went wrong, almost immediately.

“I don’t think it’s the templars that are going to murder me,” Asha murmured, as she adjusted her Knight Enchanter staff in one hand and her new practice spirit blade - a blunt sword Dagna had crafted from a near-weightless metal alloy that she now used when sparring with Cass - in the other. It had taken six days for them to find a time when they were both free. They were actually going straight to a war room meeting after this.

“Inquisitor?” Cullen glanced over from where he’d spent several minutes staring at his own practice sword, for no discernible reason.

She nodded at the audience that had amassed at the side of training ground. Twelve teenage girls, their mothers, and what she was pretty sure was half of Skyhold’s kitchen staff, were all watching. “I think your fan club might get me first,” she informed him. “Either I land a hit on you and mar your pretty physique, or you inevitably land a hit on me and I become the most envied women in Skyhold.”

Cullen blushed. She could practically hear their spectators simpering. “My… fan club?”

“Oh come on, Commander,” she grinned, “I know you’re oblivious, but you can’t be _that_ oblivious. You didn’t notice your battalion of very-much-not soldiers, that are apparently here to watch you train, every day?”

He glanced over at them, and then frowned, before blushing harder when comprehension hit. “The… the red templar army threatens us all,” he sputtered, and she gave a delighted laugh.

The audience went quiet for a second at the sound - a long, tense silence that stretched out taut, before the hum of talk started up again. Yes, his fans were _definitely_ going to kill her in her sleep, anchor and fate of the world be damned. She examined the crowd and spotted Ellana among them, grinning at her. Her sister gave a smug wave. Cassandra and Rylen were standing next to her. So was Varric, and Dorian, and Sera, and Bull, and… Creators, was that Solas? He never left the library! 

The problem with it taking so long to arrange their first bout was that word had gotten around.

“Shall we?” Cullen asked, gesturing to their spot on the field and looking about as comfortable with this whole set up as she was.

“Don’t go easy on me,” she told him, as she got into position.

“Was that ever in question?”

She gave him a hard look. He wasn’t fooling anyone. “Look - you’re a templar and that’s a thing, but you’ve seen me with Cassandra. I learn by being knocked onto my ass, repeatedly. Please don’t worry about breaking my pretty little Herald face.” 

“I thought you, ah, _weren’t_ the Herald?”

There was something about the intonation that made her pause.

“Are you trash talking me, Commander?” she asked, overjoyed by the prospect. “Is that what’s happening? Is this your version of trash talk?!”

He blushed, again, but managed to quirk an eyebrow, “well, your version seems to be telling me how easy you’ll be to defeat and injure, so…”

“No, no, keep going!” she grinned. “Maybe question the legitimacy of the Andrastian Chantry next - you know, _really_ put me in my place.”

“...Point taken. Let’s get this over with.”

“Magic or no magic?” 

“No magic.” he told her, “we need to establish a baseline.”

“I’m just saying, my baseline involves magic…”

“ _Inquisitor_.”

“Alright, _Commander_ ,” she decided to stop needling him for her own amusement. She squared her shoulders, tilted her chin up, and shook a piece of hair out of her face, “give it your best shot.”

Cullen stepped into a garde position and brought his shield up. It was one of the properly large templar types, different from Cassandra’s, designed to cover nearly his whole body from spell attacks. That meant it was practically as big as her - Asha wasn’t sure she’d even be able to lift one herself. She watched as he glanced briefly towards their audience and then narrowed his eyes, as if coming to a decision. Then, he lunged forward. 

She had about ten seconds to admire his form, before she found herself flat on her back in the dirt. 

She hadn’t even had time to react to the blow.

“You can dodge, you know,” he informed her blithely, readjusting the shield.

“I am… aware,” she breathed, scrambling to her feet. He’d moved so quickly - she hadn’t realised how used she’d gotten to Cassandra’s tells.

Ten minutes later, she fell for what felt like the fiftieth time. 

Cullen reached forward this time, and helped her up. She winced as she took the offer of aid - her ribs were aching from the repeated impacts from both the sword, shield, and the ground. “So,” he said, “maybe we should let you use magic.”

“What? Now that we’ve established that my ‘baseline’ is subterranean?”

“Your work on Knight Enchantment with Helaine has clearly been designed to integrate your magic into melee combat,” he said, much more diplomatically. “I was basing my decision on your work with Cassandra, but you clearly use your knowledge of her as a fighter. With anyone else, it seems like you’ve become reliant on Valour’s instincts. To begin with, we should establish a middle ground - no Valour to use as a crutch, but I’ll allow you to utilise the same spells you’d use in combat to bolster your abilities. We’ll work backwards from there.”

“Sounds good,” she said, though her voice was not the most certain.

He looked at her and offered a reassuring smile before parroting her own words, “Don’t go easy on me, Inquisitor. Don’t worry about breaking my pretty templar face.”

“Hawke would be so happy to hear you admit that it's pretty.”

“And that is why we shall never tell her the words even passed my lips,” he said blandly, reassuming his garde position. She followed suit, planting her feet in the dirt. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Begin.”

This time, she barriered immediately. The main problem she was having was that he was just as strong as Cassandra, but with that armour and shield he weighed probably twice as much. No matter how many hits she managed to dodge, the first one that landed annihilated her. He really had not been pulling his punches.

When he dashed forward to hit her with her shield, she let him. She saw the surprise in his face - he’d clearly expected her to evade. But her barrier had been made with a new spell she’d been delighted by when Helaine showed her, and she hadn’t had a chance to use it against Cassandra yet. She braced as his blow hit her shoulder, its impact muffled. And then her barrier rippled and _pushed back_ , the magic taking the energy from his hit and throwing it out at him. He stumbled back under the weight of his own attack and Asha lunged forward and around his shield. He reached up to parry her just in time, drawing her sword down and throwing her momentum to the right and away from him. While she recovered, he swung his shield back into position.

She remembered what Bull said, a long time ago - about how a templar was trained to fight big things and small, squishy things, but nothing that was small and still packed a punch. She wasn’t an Antivan Crow, but she could at least move like one. When Cullen charged at her again, she fade stepped behind him, aiming her sword at the centre of his back. He realised her play, no doubt seeing the flutter of her form through the Fade space, and twisted his shield arm behind him to protect himself from being flanked. 

She snarled at her ploy being foiled, and still tried to get at him before he could turn fully to face her again. Somehow, he got his sword into position and it clashed with hers when she bought it down, aiming for his shoulder. Their blades locked as he turned, trying to force her arm up and cause her to strain, playing against the weakness inherent in their height difference. She leaned in, pumping more mana into her barrier so that she could meet his strength with an artificially cultivated force of her own, forcing his sword arm downwards. She took a step forward to press her advantage, saw surprise flicker across his face. Then he shunted her with his stupid massive shield again, shoving her sword away from his. But the impact that sent her flailing backwards was then reflected back at him by her barrier, and he also stumbled back unsteadily.

“Good,” he said. Then he ducked behind his shield as, now impatient, she just charged.

And that’s how things continued - she would try to engage him, get close, and then the shield would block and disable any advantage she might have. Whereas Cassandra used her shield arm aggressively, he used his defensively. His actual swordwork was kept to a minimum. A few parries, and then a shield bash that sent her pinwheeling away. She’d never known frustration like it. On a battlefield, she would’ve simply snuck round the back of the enemy while Cassandra engaged them, and then slugged a spell at their exposed flank. Melee didn’t offer that luxury. There was only so many times she could throw the energy of his own hits back at him in an echo - and frankly, shoving him wasn’t the same as stabbing him. 

It was like running at a reinforced metal door and expecting it to break open for her, because it appreciated her dedication and persistence. Asha needed to get that fucking shield off him.

She had another new spell she’d been absolutely _dying_ to try.

When she disengaged this time, she reached out for the Veil around her, and tugged it down around her shoulders. Cullen braced and narrowed his eyes as she vanished from view, clearly expecting another fade step. 

But this wasn’t a fade step. 

She ran straight at him in real time, hidden from view, passing through his shield as if it wasn’t there and standing in the circle of his shield arm while he glanced about confusedly, clearly wondering where and _when_ she would materialise. Grinning, she braced herself as the chilling presence of her fade cloak began to slip from her grasp. Once in position, she dropped the spell immediately and rematerialised in the material world.

Startled, Cullen looked down as she appeared in front of him. She was so close he almost went cross-eyed. He had very much not expected her to be basically an inch from his face.

“Hi,” she said, with a wickedly pleased grin. His mouth parted in a shocked intake of breath that ghosted across her face.

And then she flung away the excess mana she’d pulled from the Veil, and the disintegrating fade cloak _exploded outwards_.

The impact of the blast forced Cullen’s shield arm out and away from him - not enough to break it, because she wasn’t a _monster_. She directed most of the blast’s force forward at the bulwark of his chest, which meant the man himself was thrown backwards five feet, sailing through the air. Asha sprinted after him, swordpoint first. When he landed splayed in the dirt, the weight of his shield pinned his left arm to the ground, leaving his body exposed. 

Asha pounced before he could leverage himself up even to sitting. There was a soft ‘oof’ as she collided with him, any air remaining in his lungs clearly forced out by the impact as he was forced back to the ground. She landed on his chest, her knees either side of his body and pinning his arms down and away.

She brought her sword down to rest against his exposed neck.

“Yield,” Asha demanded. 

She thought she heard a squeal from their audience - whether it was Ellana cheering her success, or a teenage girl’s outrage, she couldn’t tell.

Cullen stared up at her, blinking like a startled owl. He couldn’t seem to speak. Like her, he was breathing heavily, heat rising to his face from the exertion. She was glad she’d at least been tiring him out, and that she might have repaid some of the bruises she’d have tomorrow. Honestly, bringing him to the ground left her feeling even more triumphant than when she’d felled Bull. 

“Come on, yield!” she cried, panting, as hair fell in sweaty strands around her face, “that was fucking amazing! What more do you even _want?_ ”

“I… yield,” he groaned, his voice barely there. He dropped his sword to the dirt with a clatter, let out a long, strained breath, then looked at where she was perched on his chest, “um… Inquisitor?”

Realising he’d tapped out, she hurriedly pushed back and away from him, moving to stand. That was when she saw the true cause of his distress. His entire chest plate had buckled inwards with the power of her decloaking blast. She’d not noticed the deformation when she’d launched herself bodily at him.

“Fuck!” she cried, horrified, once more falling to her knees, only this time at one side of his prone form. She looked at the crumpled breast plate, “oh my gods, are you ok???!”

“I’ll… live…” Cullen wheezed, although he didn’t sound so sure.

“Shit! Oh shit! Oh _shit_! Oh my gods, I’m so sorry,” Asha started, staring wide-eyed at the destruction she’d caused, “what do I do? Do I take it off? Where are the buckles? Do you want me to ice it?”

Cullen looked vaguely horrified as she leaned over him, reaching forward to try and find the straps keeping the mail in place. She touched the fastenings his shoulder, and he gave a grunt of pain, “Asha-”

“Solas!” Asha leaned back and called out, frantically searching for him in their audience. “Solas, help! I think… I think I broke Cullen!”

She’d fractured three of his ribs. Asha was mortified.

Rylen, Varric, and Bull couldn’t stop laughing.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she said, for the fiftieth time, as the Commander finally, tentatively, sat up. He was handed a health potion by the on-duty spirit healer who’d mended and iced his injuries. Ellana had gotten her wish: she finally got to see Cullen shirtless... only it was in the worst possible way. They’d had to remove his armour and cut part of his shirt away to survey the trauma. The centre of his chest and the right side of his body was now a patchwork of deep, purple-black bruises, their formation accelerated by the healing process that had pieced his ribs back together. They looked _painful_. She’d sat by him the whole time, stewing in her guilt and embarrassed horror.

“It’s fine, Inquisitor,” Cullen replied in a weary voice, as he put the potion to his lips and downed it all in one go.

“No it’s not!” she told him. “I _hurt_ you.”

“That’s rather the point, is it not? It was a very... effective attack.”

“...It’s called a decloaking blast. Helaine taught me last week.”

“I would definitely advocate using it against Samson, in the future.”

“I’m really, _really_ sorry.”

“Really, don’t worry about it. No… _permanent_ damage.”

“Oh my gods,” Asha muttered, burying her burning face in her hands. “I almost killed my army general.” 

She decided to stay curled up in that position until Corypheus came and destroyed Skyhold, and put her out of her misery.

“Asha,” she peered up through her fingers to see Cullen watching her display with an amused expression. “You were _supposed_ to defeat me. It really was a very impressive attack. And one you should employ against any and all templars you encounter in the future.”

Asha peeled one hand away from her face, to stare at him. Almost of their own accord, her eyes trailed down his bare chest, taking in the brutal damage she’d done. She saw Cullen see her do it, and he winced when he tried to fidget and caused himself pain. In a far and remote part of her mind, she noted that she’d ruined a _very_ impressive view. His shoulders were luckily unscathed, and those _alone_... 

That fan club was definitely going to poison her tea, or smother her in her sleep, or something.

She opened her mouth, hoping for a witty quip, but all that came tumbling out was, “I’m so so _so_ sorry.”

Cullen rolled his eyes. “I’ll survive a few broken ribs. Really, Asha, I thought you _enjoyed_ hurting templars. It wasn’t so long ago that I was certain you wanted to kill me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Knight Enchanters: I just think they're neat.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy this chapter! It's one of my favourites so far, for OBVIOUS REASONS. The spells Asha uses are Fade Cloak/decloaking blast, and Veiled Riposte.
> 
> See everyone next week ;) xx


	54. Chapter Fifty-Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Helping the Commander with his coat (this is a terrible, but accurate, chapter summary).

Word soon got around Skyhold that the Inquisitor had nearly murdered Commander Rutherford during their first lesson together. Rumours were that she’d intentionally stabbed him. If there were still people in the world that believed Asha was a secret mage supremacist, she had a feeling that their conspiracy would soon gain momentum. 

Asha had to go back to training with Cassandra while Cullen recovered. Her audience trebled in size, the groups of people at the sidelines clearly only there to see her attempt offing another advisor. It was mortifying. When she tried to complain about it in the Herald's Rest - “the one time I _didn’t_ mean to hurt a templar, and it’s going to become my legacy!” - Varric nearly wet himself laughing. 

“I just… the bruising… over his heart,” he said, wheezing. “It’s too literal. If I wrote that shit, I’d get accused of being a hack!”

“You _are_ a hack,” observed Solas, in an unusually terse voice, taking a sip from his drink as Varric chortled on.

Asha hadn’t read any of Varric’s books yet. But she supposed that her striking a killing blow right at a templar’s heart _was_ a bit of a heavy handed symbol for her feelings regarding the Order.

Two days later, it seemed that Cass took pity on her. She informed Asha that she’d gotten word of the missing Seekers of Truth, and requested that she accompany her on a week-long excursion to Caer Oswin.

That invitation bought its own problems, however. Asha could vividly remember the cruelty in the face of Seeker Lucius, as he insulted her and called her a dangerous abomination. She still didn’t understand why Cass cared so much about such a horrid man. And the only person who could offer her any insight into the issue - other than Varric, who simply said ‘he didn’t buy into all that fanatic stuff’ - was, well…

“Thank you so much for making time for me,” she said to Cullen, biting her lip as she watched him… walk gingerly… almost _limp_... towards the door to his office. They’d come from a war room meeting in which Cassandra had laid out her plans for Caer Oswin. Leliana had very visibly fought to keep a smile off her face every time Cullen leaned over to examine the map and winced, while Josie continually made sympathetic noises. Asha wanted _to die_.

“Asha,” he said, pushing open the door before Asha had a chance to offer to do it for him. “You injured me, you didn’t - I don’t know… insult my mother. There’s no need to be so polite that you thank me for helping with Inquisition business.”

He was wearing a dark coat over a plain white shirt, rather than his usual armour. Because of course - he was having to get new armour commissioned, after she’d destroyed his original set. The words _I’m so sorry_ bubbled up her throat, but she managed to swallow them back down again.

“I want to know what we’re getting into, going after them” she said as they walked over to his desk. “But I… Cass doesn’t seem like the most objective person to ask on the subject. She’s convinced the Seekers must have been attacked and imprisoned somewhere, but we saw Lucius just stroll out of Val Royeaux! After he _punched a Chantry mother_. What if he’s complicit with Samson? I want to be prepared for anything that might... do you want some help with that?”

She’d been about to take her seat, but then had frozen for several seconds, watching as he attempted to take off his jacket. Every time he reached up to pull his arms out of the sleeves, he winced. She knew, from the state of her own bruises after sparring, that such an action would be doing all sorts of unpleasant things with the muscles all along his back and his sides. 

_Not to mention to the ribs you broke_.

Cullen glanced at her nervously. She guessed he was the kind of person who didn’t ask for help very often on anything, never mind something as basic as removing a coat. “Um… if you wouldn’t mind?”

“Mythal’s tits, it’s basic hospitality - help the people you incapacitate. Deshanna would be rolling in her grave if I didn’t,” she said, as she moved back around the desk. “Why aren’t you wearing the usual,” she made an expansive hand gesture, “fluffy thing, anyway?”

“Err…” his cheeks pinked. “I think it looks a little silly - with just a shirt, I mean.”

Asha didn’t have the heart to tell him that it looked ‘a little silly’ with the armour as well. She wondered who exactly had told Cullen to adopt a lion motif so wholeheartedly, and whether or not they could have words.

But, revelling in the discovery that Cullen Rutherford had a modicum of vanity, and didn’t just arrive in the world perfectly, effortlessly beautiful, she moved round the side of the desk and came up behind him. She waited for his nod before she stepped closer. He was so tall that she had to reach up on her tiptoes to reach around and grab the jacket’s collar. As she peeled it back and off his shoulders, her knuckle accidentally brushed against the side of his neck, just under his ear. Cullen practically jumped a mile at the contact, then let out a pained hiss.

“Sorry, sorry!” she said instinctively, freezing in place. Then she wondered why exactly she was apologising. She hadn’t done anything - the pain had all been caused by his reaction.

Freezing made things weird. It was such a perfectly everyday occurrence to remove a coat. You didn’t become conscious of the steps in the process... until suddenly you were. She was noticing just how close she was standing to him, the heat coming off his body like a furnace. Her hands were lightly resting against his strong back, and at her normal height, her eyes were pinned directly on the tense and very appealing angles of his shoulder blades. _Fucking Ellana,_ she thought, cursing her sister for suddenly giving her a new awareness of soldiers’ torsos, the absolute pervert. _Gods, he smells really nice._

“You smell really nice,” she blurted, and then her eyes nearly bugged out of her skull in incredulous horror at her own words, and the fucking travesty that was her brain. What the fuck was wrong with her?!

For a second, everything went deadly quiet in the room. Just to really, _really_ let the reality of those words settle. 

Then she hurriedly got moving and started tugging the coat fully off him, cheeks blazing as she pulled it down his arms. _You cannot tell people how nice they smell, you moron._

“What is it? The smell, I mean?” she asked, cursing how shrill her voice sounded. “Did you do the servant-organised private bath thing, with the stupid amount of soaps?” 

_You did not just ask this man about his bathing habits, what is_ wrong _with you!_ But... she didn’t seem able to stop. “Ellana is a huge fan. I’m worried that she’s going to permanently deplete Skyhold’s hot water supply, single-handedly. Such unnecessarily decadent tastes for someone who used to make do with ponds. I’m ruined for any and all future missions.”

She scurried over to the coat rack where she hung up his jacket. Stopping there to smooth out the creases, she briefly fantasised about continuing walking straight out of the office door. And perhaps stepping off the walkway, to a blissful oblivion splatted on the courtyard below.

A quick glance back at Cullen and she saw his entire face was red as well. _That’s what happens when you ask people about how they bathe, you heathen_. “It’s - ah - muscle soak,” he stuttered, clearly at a loss regarding what to do with his disaster of an Inquisitor, “from the healers. For the - ah -”

“Grievous bodily harm I inflicted on you? Yes,” said Asha, “let’s focus on that, rather than whatever the fuck just came out of _my_ mouth, shall we?”

Cullen stared at her for a long moment, and she just felt it burn right through her. The embarrassment was palpable, and the only explanation for why her stomach felt like it was squirming.

“So…” he said, quietly, gesturing to the seat opposite him. He cleared his throat. “The Seekers of Truth…”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure!”

“You don’t mind? I can get someone else to go with Cassandra,” Asha said, knowing that she sounded like someone’s worrying, overly-coddling mother. “I don’t want to leave you on your own.”

“You are very much _not_ leaving me on my own, _asa’ma’lin_ ,” Ellana laughed, as they walked out of the stables with Buttons, “you left me with a whole castle of soon-to-be-friends! And isn’t it a bit... _late..._ to be having these doubts?”

She glanced meaningfully over to the entrance of Skyhold, where Cassandra, Solas, and Varric all waited, their mounts already saddled.

“I just…” Asha huffed, reminding herself that it would be _extremely foolish_ to cry, “I thought we’d have more time.”

She’d only been stationed in Skyhold for a couple of weeks - that made it just over three weeks since she’d found El again. It felt near blasphemous to be leaving her once more, so soon. With the next big thing on the horizon being Halamshiral, which was an age away in Umbralis, she hadn’t expected many missions to come up and take her away from Skyhold. If it was just a territory scouting mission, she’d consider taking Ellana with her. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that, in going to Caer Oswin, they were walking into danger.

“It’s only two weeks, Ash,” Ellana said with a fond and slightly tired smile, which told Asha that she understood exactly what she was feeling. “You’ll be back before we both know it.”

“I’ll still miss you.”

“Well, I’m not sure I’ll miss you!” Ellana said with a wink. “I have your big squishy bed all to myself; Bull is taking over the card circle while Varric’s away; Sera’s promised to teach me how to make one of those jars of bees…”

“You say these things, like they are supposed to reassure me.”

“Stop worrying.” El said, poking her nose, “you’ll get all those forehead wrinkles, like mother had. Your vallaslin will go all squiggly and squashed.”

“Lies!”

“Seriously though, I’ll be fine,” Ellana said, squeezing Asha’s hand and tugging her to a stop. “So take care of yourself, rather than worrying about me. And come back safe.”

Buttons huffed and shifted from foot to foot as Asha pulled her sister in for a tight hug. “ _Ar lath ma_ ,” she muttered into her sister’s hair.

“I love you too,” Ellana said, squeezing hard back. They stayed like that for a few breaths, neither of them wanting to let go.

“...You’ll go to Josephine if you have any problems?”

“By Mythal, Ash! I’m twenty-three!” El said, shoving herself away. “What are you? _Seventy_?”

“Ok, ok, sorry,” Asha said, grinning. “You’re right, I’ll be back home soon.”

And it was home, wasn’t it? Now that Ellana was here, Skyhold truly felt like _hers_.

“Yes, you will, and things will be grand. Now go!” Ellana said, shooing her with an exasperated look. “Go kill templars, or whatever it is you're supposed to be doing!” 

“Saving them, I think?” Asha said, though she really wasn’t holding out hope on that front. She’d distrusted Cassandra and Cullen on principle, and she _liked_ them. Seeker Lucius’ entire presence had just felt… slimy. She could imagine him in some darkened room, cackling away over an evil plan, with far too much ease.

She gave Ellana another hug and then walked over to where the others were waiting. As she mounted up onto Buttons, she only sniffled twice. She saw Solas give her a sharp look out of the corner of her eye. “She’ll be safe, _lethallan_ ,” he told her, “no harm will come to her within these walls.”

“Better fucking hope not,” Asha grumbled, scrubbing at her face as they lead the horses out of the portcullis, and walked them out across the main drawbridge. She glanced back and saw the small silhouette of Ellana illuminated in the archway, waving goodbye. She waved back, then told herself she had to look away, otherwise she really would cry. 

As she shifted to turn back and face forward, she also noticed sunlight glancing off a flash of gold on the ramparts above: Cullen - or rather, Cullen’s blonde hair, bent from where he was talking with… Dorian, it seemed? The two of them were chatting on the battlements by his office.

He was too far away for her to be certain, but she thought she saw his head turn, noticing their progress out and away from the castle. Before she knew what she was doing, she craned her neck, raised her hand, and waved goodbye to him too. And Dorian, she supposed. 

Dorian waved almost immediately. There was a slight hesitation, but she smiled when she saw the Commander raise his hand and wave back as well. She smiled.

“You haven’t done that before,” Cassandra noted, with a cursory glance in her direction. “Said goodbye.”

“Really?” Asha settled back in her seat, wondering why she was grinning so hard. “How awfully rude of me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter, so no real author's notes for this. If you liked the High Romance of jacket removal, I can only recommend you read The Dark Days Club series by Alison Goodman, a Regency era paranormal romance that taught me the Inherent Eroticism of Gentleman's Coats.
> 
> See you tomorrow! :)


	55. Chapter Fifty-Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asha begins preparations for Halamshiral

“Inquisitor?”

“Hmm?” Asha looked up from the war table, where her mind had been drifting. “Sorry, Josie, you’ll have to repeat that.”

“I was just telling you that, from this week onwards, your schedule will include training in Orlesian dances and etiquette. Our talks with Gaspard’s liaison concluded… while you were away. We have secured our invitation to the Winter Palace.”

“Oh,” Asha didn't exactly sound enthused. “Dance lessons can’t be worse than sparring, I suppose.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Cullen said, although he put his hand to his now fully healed ribs, clearly trying to lighten the mood.

She threw him a bone, and offered a weak jibe, “ if anyone can sustain broken ribs from dancing with Orlesians, it’s probably me.”

“I know it will be hard to see this training as a priority, given our attendance at the fête is a front for our true purpose,” Leliana said. “But the masquerade will last several days, and we do not know when the assassination will take place. It will hardly serve us to get kicked out on the first night.”

“You say that like it’s somehow inevitable,” Asha said. “I thought I did ok at the victory feast...” Then, she recalled how she’d basically passed out, “oh. Maybe not.”

“You’re Dalish,” Leliana said bluntly, “and Orlais is…”

“Orlais.”

“They will look for any excuse to embarrass you and expose you as a heretical savage,” the Nightingale continued. “Some will do so not even out of malice, but merely for entertainment. Rather than attack you directly, the person we are trying to foil will likely just have _la noblesse_ do the job for them.”

“Charming country,” Cullen muttered.

“So, who’s the poor soul who must train this ‘heretical savage’?” Asha asked.

Josie bit her lip, looking guilty. “Um, well...”

“...It’s Vivienne, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Leliana said. “Not only is she our foremost expert on Orlesian politics, she is also understands how to navigate the Grand Game while facing prejudice as a mage.”

“I don’t think I can bootlick with quite so much skill in one of those bell skirts.” _And I don’t feel like fucking my way to power either,_ Asha thought with a grimace.

Leliana gave her a sharp glare. “You may disagree with Madame de Fer’s politics, but the fact remains that she was a mere merchant’s daughter, who clawed her way up the Orlesian hierarchy from _inside_ a Circle tower. It took her only two balls to get where she is, while others will spend their lives bidding and begging for her level of influence. The position of _Magicienne_ was seen as little more than a court jester, before she shaped it into position with real political power. She is one of the most powerful women in Orlais, a personal friend of Empress Celene, and if you think she has licked boots at _any_ point in her life, you’re a fool.”

Asha winced, realising that she had spoken out of turn. “Sorry, I’m-”

“I know what happened at Caer Oswin was hard, on both you and Cassandra,” Leliana said, face softening, “but you will not have the luxury of that excuse for much longer. One wrong word at Halamshiral will get you executed, and there will be no trial at which to explain the intricacies of your delicate emotional state.”

“Point taken,” Asha said, her mouth a grim line. She couldn’t resist glancing at the spot at the table where the Seeker usually stood, which was notably empty. Cassandra hadn’t been in the company of anything but that awful tome they’d plucked from Lucius’ cooling body, ever since they arrived back at Skyhold. She was shut in her rooms, reading it cover to cover, and allowing no visitors.

Caer Oswin had been a blood bath. While Asha had had to suffer watching everyone she loved die, Cassandra had been required to slay them with her own hand. And then, at the end of that bloody, brutal path, they had met with a man who spoke words Asha almost believed.

_”We Seekers are abominations, Cassandra. We created a decaying world, and fought to preserve it even as it crumbled. We had to be stopped.”_ Someone who believed the Chantry was wrong, that the suffering inflicted by the Circles on both mages and templars was abhorrent, but who had used that belief to justify his own bid for power at the expense of many lives. Convinced he knew what was right.

Was she any different?

_Yes, because I’m not bottle-feeding anybody red lyrium,_ she thought grumpily. But such arguments hadn’t really helped her get a good night’s sleep in the last week.

“Will Ellana be taking the lessons as well?” she didn’t think her sister would ever forgive her if she went to an Orlesian ball without her.

“Yes.” Josephine said.

“All members of the Inquisition that we plan to have in attendance must take the lessons, even if it is just as a ‘refresher’,” Cullen said, in a tone of voice that told Asha he relished the prospect about as much as she did.

She grinned at him, “you say this, like you’re already court-trained. Was there much cause for that, for templars in Kirkwall? Did you have _ambitions_? Should I start calling you ‘Ser Rutherford’?”

Cullen cast an unimpressed look her way, but it was rendered ineffectual by the way his ears burned. “Please. Don’t.”

“Does Varric know about your etiquette lessons? _Does Sid?_ ”

“Inquisitor-”

“Ellana can be included as part of your private tutelage with Lady Vivienne as well, though,” Josephine interrupted, while Leliana looked on impassively, “if you would like. I have your first session scheduled in for tomorrow.”

Asha stopped snickering, and turned back to her ambassador. “Yes, please. Can Sera be there too? I’m not going to lie, I would _pay money_ to have Sera be there too.”

Sera did not get to be there too - if only because, best Asha could gather, she had died laughing at the invitation.

After just half an hour under the incredibly critical eye of Madame de Fer, and Asha kind of wished she also wasn’t there. Or maybe that she was collapsed dead on the floor as well.

“Again,” Vivienne said, as Asha executed the bow owed to a Marchioness known to have mage blood in her family, which was slightly different to that of a Marchioness without. “Keep your chin at an upward tilt. Your eyes should not at any point look at the ground, or imply deference. And by the Maker, I say this while entertaining no hope you’ll listen, but don’t slope your shoulders this time.”

Asha set her mouth in a determined frown, and repeated the movements. Ellana did the same a second later, although none of these complaints had been levelled at her.

Vivienne sighed, took a sip of her tea, and crossed her legs where she sat. “Again.”

“Why does it _matter_ if this hypothetical Marchioness has mages in the family?” Asha couldn’t help but grumble. It was a petty remark that was just asking for trouble. But no one told you how much bowing would hurt, if you performed the act two hours after Knight Enchantment training. “Why does she get a different bow?”

“Because she may yet bear a mage for her husband’s heir.”

“So she’s worthy of less deference? Ew.”

“A mage cannot inherit. Or couldn’t, in the old world.”

“What if the husband has mages in the family?”

“Then he will get the version of the bow _I literally just taught you_ ,” Vivienne said tersely, before adding, like a slap, “dear.”

Asha didn’t quite want to ask how exactly she would know which families had mage blood and which didn’t. She had an awful feeling there would be _genealogical family trees_ involved. “So, Ellana will get a different bow to me? Because she has mages in the family?”

“Ellana will get a different bow than you, because you are one of the Blessed of Andraste,” Vivienne replied. “Though one could never tell… from the _slope of your shoulders_. Try it again.”

Asha sent a quick prayer to the Creators, careful to not quite direct it at Elgar'nan. She was friends with templars now. She was learning not to hold grudges. She shouldn’t bring down the God of Vengeance on Madame de Fer’s head.

“Doesn’t this… annoy you?” she said, eyes pinned on the floor. _Oh shit._ her eyes weren’t supposed to be on the floor. She tilted her chin hastily, “why do I show someone who may or may not pop out a mage baby less deference when _I’m_ a mage? Does this mean I get no bows at all?”

“It is how things are done, dear,” Vivienne said blandly. “A mage who walks into a court as a mage will be treated as such. They would never presume to hold the position of Marchioness in the first place. A person who walks into a court holding a title while also having magic confirmed in their bloodline is… a calculated risk. And so is _also_ treated as such.”

“That’s fucking stupid.”

“Yes, I can see why _you_ might think so.”

“Seriously, aren’t you angry? This is offensive. _Any_ family can give birth to a mage.” That had certainly been the case for Asha’s family. In fact, the Dalish believed that the Creators made it so that a clan always had a successor to their Keeper, and so Asha’s powers had been seen as the logical consequence of Deshanna having no children. “How can this not piss you off?”

“What good does getting angry do me, dear? Either I give the correct bow, or I don’t,” Vivienne said. "At the end of the day, giving the wrong bow hurts my standing far more than it will ever help a Marchioness, who no doubt knowingly underwent quite the endeavour of social climbing.”

“So, does having mage blood stop you from marrying well?” Ellana asked. Asha cast her a glance, wondering if she entertained any plans of wooing the Prince of Starkhaven. Varric had done some digging for her, and word was, he had an invitation.

“It is but one factor in many that concerns breeding,” Vivienne said. "In the same way the right name cancels out an unfortunate dip in recent wealth, a beautiful face will save a mage-blooded noble from the worst matches. Looking and moving as you do, with the Herald of Andraste as a relative, you’ll do fine, dear.”

“What about Ash?” Ellana asked, suddenly, “in Dalish culture, her being a mage and the First meant that everyone wanted to marry her.”

“Says the woman with fifteen proposals under her belt.”

“It’s twenty, now, actually, but that’s because I never had any sweethearts, _asa’ma’lin_ ,” Ellana pointed out. “I know some people were interested in you, but they didn’t want to get in the way of your relationships, so never asked.” She turned back to Vivienne, “but in human society, it’s different, right? If Ash wanted to marry a human - any human, not just a noble - would her being a mage stop her from doing so?”

Vivienne dragged her eyes across Asha’s form, taking in her plain shirt and breeches, considering. “In the old world, it was different. She would’ve been in a Circle, which means no marriage, regardless of who you love or what class they are,” she said. “The rules can be bent, not broken. Bastien and I came to an arrangement that served me perfectly well, but I knew I could never become his wife. Now... well. I suppose it’s a free-for-all and mages are welcome to do as they please.”

“No need to sound so pleased about it,” Asha muttered, hearing the lukewarm tone of the woman’s voice. She guessed she must not love Bastien very much, if the fact that she could now marry him didn’t fill her with excitement.

“It all depends on what you want, my dear. A marriage can be a prison too, you know, and I’ve seen it prove to be an extremely unstable form of power,” Vivienne said, as if she could hear her thoughts. “I doubt you even need to worry. If you wish to enter the nobility, then you have your ticket already on your hand in the form of Andraste’s gift, no need for a ring. And if you want to be adorably quaint and get married for love, then I would frankly hope that the person you chose would have no qualms marrying an apostate. Otherwise it’s a needless exercise in futility.”

“But nobody would stop her?” Ellana asked. “If she found someone?”

“I doubt anybody could, with an army at her back.”

“Better get married quick, then,” Asha said, sarcastically, “while I can still scare a wedding into existence. And before you reinstate the Circles, lock us all up again, and put our chastity belts back on.”

“I said _nothing_ about chastity, my dear. If you think the Circles entailed celibacy, then you’ve clearly not spoken to anyone about them, your Commander included. But of course, you’ll have no hope for a spouse, if you don’t _pull your shoulders back_ ,” Vivienne said, again, with a bland expression and an equally acerbic tone. “Now, let me show you the bow for the elfish emissary of a member of the royal family - this is the only kind of elf that will ever receive acknowledgement, and only when they are acting in the clear role as the royal’s mouthpiece…”

The rest of the lesson was an arduous drilling of etiquette, that Asha could feel slipping from her brain even as she listened. _I’ll just speak to this Gaspard and Celene, and no one else, to streamline my bowing responsibilities,_ she thought, wondering how much dancing was going to take out of her if bowing alone caused her to strain a muscle along her left side.

They were reaching the conclusion of her lesson - at least, they were, in Asha’s mind - when suddenly someone charged out onto the balcony where Vivienne favoured holding court. It was Cassandra, looking pale and tired and… _furious_. Asha hatstily straightened out of whatever curtsy she was currently being subjected to, and ran over to her. It was the first time she had seen the Seeker in days, since she shut herself up with that book.

“Inquisitor,” Cass said, in a flat voice that sounded forcibly devoid of emotion. It spoke of how upset she must be - she’d spoken in that voice after Adamant, too. “I need to speak with you. Privately. Now, if possible.”

“Of course,” Asha said, worried and also a little thankful to have an excuse. “Are you ok?”

“No, I’m not,” Cassandra said, already striding away and giving Asha no chance to even glance back and get Vivienne’s approval to depart. “And neither will you be, once you hear this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bit of a breather chapter before some intense times in next week, so I hope you enjoy it. Asha and Vivienne are always going to be at odds but I'm not entirely sure this is all Vivienne's fault... there will be more interactions between them in coming chapters, with hopefully some good character development and nuance!
> 
> See you next week.


	56. Chapter Fifty-Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Revelations regarding tranquility.

Cassandra was a former tranquil.

She hadn’t been forcibly submitted to a humiliating ritual. She didn’t have a brand that she would wear on her skin forever. 

But she… she _knew_ tranquility. She was a former tranquil.

And her people, Cassandra’s people - they knew -

Anders hadn’t - Kirkwall wasn’t - the Mage Rebellion, what happened to _her_...

“I need to ask you something,” Asha said, when she finally found Solas in the rotunda. He was sat at his desk, and had paint on his hands and under his fingernails. She’d walked to the library in a nearly blind daze, and this was the first thing she noticed. “Or maybe… I need to tell you something.”

“ _Lethallan_?” He looked over at her, frowning at whatever he saw in her face as she walked over. 

“Am I spirit-touched?” she asked.

His eyes narrowed, “I don’t… follow…?”

“I don’t know if that’s a thing,” she confessed. “I - have you met any spirits of faith? Have you looked at Cassandra in the Fade? Have you seen what she looks like?”

“Asha… I think we need to go somewhere private to have this conversation.”

“Why?” Asha’s voice rose irrationally high. She saw people looking down at their conversation from the balconies above. “Because you already know?”

“Because I know what?” he asked, perplexed.

“ _Do you?_ ”

“I’m saying this because you sound upset, and I think you would prefer if we didn’t have an audience,” he said , standing up with his hands held in a gesture of surrender. He took a few steps forward, and held out his hand.

Asha let him drag her away, not sure where they were going until she recognised the path to his quarters. Words tumbled out of her, feeling like they came from very far away. “It’s just… you have to know. Don’t you? You talk to spirits all the time, about everything. About ancient times, about how people work, about what they had for fucking breakfast. You must know…”

“Asha, I’m going to need you to slow down,” he said, using her name again, tightening his grip on her fingers. “You’re shaking.”

He opened the door to his room. It was a tiny, monastic thing, with a single bed, a basin, and not much else. It looked out onto the courtyard that Asha had weeded, her first week here. She stood there, staring out of the window, until he manoeuvred her to sit down on his bed, on top of his plain, neatly-made and creaseless sheets. He got down onto his knees in front of her, looking into her eyes and holding her quaking hands between his.

“ _Lethallan_ , would you care to start from the beginning?”

"H- _How?_ "

"...Try."

“Do you know why demons don’t like tranquil?” she asked him. “You ever asked any of them about it?”

"No, I haven’t. I don’t necessarily talk with... demons.”

“People tell you that it locks them out. The Rite. That’s what it’s supposed to do. But it doesn’t.”

“We… we already knew this… from the oculara…”

“It turns out,” Asha said, thinking how in any other situation it would be mildly amusing to be explaining magic to Solas, and not the other way around. “It turns out that the only reason demons don’t possess us is because they don’t _want_ us. They possess bodies to experience life, and love, and feeling. And a tranquil has none of that. We’re like the choice between a human, and a rock. A piece of furniture. It’s all a question of _preference_ , not impossibility. We don’t have anything inside us. We’re empty and bland and uninteresting, and so we’re invisible to everything in the Fade. In fact, it’s not like a human and a rock. It’s like… a meal with seasoning versus a meal without. Gruel, or a multi-tiered dessert. We’re _tasteless_. We’re nothing.”

“Asha,” Solas tightened his grip, clearly trying to pull her back down to earth, when she didn’t want to be there for a _second_. “You know you’re not those things. Not anymore.”

“And you know who _also_ isn’t like that anymore? Cassandra.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“The Rite of Tranquility,” Asha let out a little laugh then, a wild sound. “I don’t think they even need the brand. It’s like… like _window dressing_. To force your mind to where they want it to be.”

“You’re not making sense. The Seeker isn’t a mage.”

“No, no she’s not. But she has _magic_.”

“...Yes. She does.” His eyes narrowed in at least a little understanding at that, but then he looked back at her and it became concern again. After a moment of hesitation, he reached up and smoothed her hair back from her face, and Asha had to fight the urge to close her eyes. It would be so easy, she thought, just to let herself be comforted. But no, she had to take responsibility. To _explain_.

“Take your time,” he told her, gently. 

“Cassandra found a cure for the Rite of Tranquility,” Asha said. “She doesn’t want to tell anyone.”

She was trying to be more angry about that, honestly, but the only feeling it left her with was helplessness. Who would revealing the cure help, now, anyway? They found no tranquil in their travels, and new oculara every day.

“How did she find...? The Lord Seeker’s book.”

“It says that the way you make a Seeker, the way you _always_ make a Seeker, is that you make them tranquil,” Asha said, forcing the words from her mouth. “You empty them out, until they’re just a… righteous vessel. Pure. And then you…” she swallowed, “you get a mage, those mages who are not supposed to parlay with the Fade in the first place, you get one to summon a spirit, and that spirit reaches out to them. And it _brings them back_. ”

Solas actually looked horrified for a second, and Asha realised she was telling him something he truly hadn’t known. She supposed the Rite of Tranquility might not mean much to the world outside of Circles - for her, it had been something Deshanna had told her about, but didn’t factor much into her daily life. But his expression softened as understanding dawned, working through the problem she’d laid out for him, the pieces of the puzzle falling into place. “A mirror of what happens with demons, then, to create the oculara.”

“They used tranquility to give themselves power, and then they changed it, _adapted_ it, to take power from us.” the words tasted like ashes in her mouth. “They know the cure. They’ve always known the cure, before they even created the Rite. But spirits don’t find tranquil again without help, because the Rite hides anyone from view. That’s what happened to me. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find the Fade… the Fade couldn’t find me.”

“...I see.” Solas’ expression looked sorrowful, and a thumb instinctively brushed against Asha’s cheek. She supposed that, for Solas, the idea of being lost to the Fade was probably the worst thing he could imagine.

“Do you?” she asked, “it’s just - I’ve _met_ a Spirit of Faith-”

He blinked at her.

“In the Fade,” Asha continued, “Divine Justinia’s spirit. At Adamant. She helped us against the Nightmare. If that’s not a Spirit of Faith, I don’t know what the fuck is. And she knew me, already. She’d already met me - in the Fade, when the Conclave exploded. Solas, what if - what if my tranquility being gone _isn’t_ because of the anchor? What if it’s because I’m touched by Faith, like Cassandra was, because I saw Justinia die and everything all just happened at once, and so maybe we just misunderstood the cause-”

“I,” Solas looked actually terrified, hand falling limply away from her cheek. “I - no - that’s-”

She’d never seen him stutter before. He always seemed so sure.

“Or what if… what if…” she reached out and gripped his hands tightly. Getting the explanation out was actually doing a lot to fight off the daze that had threatened to overwhelm her. “The orb. I have memories of the orb now. I took it from Corypheus, I touched it briefly. It’s from Fen’Harel, right? An object used to worship him. So what if _that’s_ my Spirit of Faith? It’s magic, it’s the closest I’ll ever get to be to one of the Evanuris, and I was no longer tranquil after I touched it. What if the anchor is an unrelated symptom, not the cause?”

“I…”

“That’s why I need to know - do I look like I’m touched by spirits? Are all spirits of Faith Andrastian? They can’t be, surely? _Other_ religions exist. Spirits are made through an accrual of meaning over mortal life spans, right? So what if the belief that fed the ritual, or whatever the fuck it is that orb is for, fixed me?”

She paused, waiting for a response, an answer. Solas just stared at her, mouth open. That kind of terrified her - she’d never seen him so wrong-footed.

But his lack of knowledge emboldened her to say the very next thing that popped into her head. “Say Fen’Harel saved me at Haven - I know you don’t believe me, and that’s fine, but I’m sorry, that fall was a stroke of divine intervention. What if we’re… I don’t know…” she huffed, “maybe being called the Herald of Andraste for so long is giving me a false sense of grandeur, but what if I was salvaged by tranquility from a connection to the Evanuris? Fen-Harel, specifically, I suppose. That could be a thing? Right?”

“No.”

Asha froze mid-sentence. “No?”

“If the Divine was made a Spirit of Faith, maybe we can attribute your cure to her,” he said, “but the orb is an inanimate object, and spirits are nothing inanimate. And you are _not_ connected to Fen’Harel.”

“How would you know?”

“I know.”

“Oh? Because you didn’t look like you knew roughly ten seconds ago,” she said. “I know you don’t believe in the Gods the way I do, but spirits don’t work base in fact, they work based in feeling - you taught me that. A Spirit of Faith could be linked to an object and follow it around, guarding it, even if it’s not in it, specifically. It would be weird if the orb didn’t have a Spirit of Faith tied to it, honestly. I know the Dread Wolf is a little bit of shitty god, but people do still worship him. The meaning people find in him would still _matter_.”

“It’s the anchor, Asha,” he told her, suddenly. “It’s a magical anomaly which stitches your flesh to the Fade. Nothing more mystical at work than that - and it's not like that isn’t already extremely mystical. You’ve already been handed something unlike anything in this world..”

“Really?” she said, and her voice was hard. She withdrew her hands from his as her confused half-hope deflated in her chest and became cold, rock-solid. “Because that ‘mystical, magical anomaly’ causes me pain _every day_. Do you know how much my hand fucking hurts - _all the time?_ ”

“I know… that it’s unstable. I can perhaps find some spells to block the pain, help you withstand it better...”

“Do you know what it is to be shackled to the one thing that gives you salvation but also leaves you trapped? Right now, we need it for closing rifts. I keep it, for that purpose. But one day that won’t be necessary anymore, and I would really, _really_ like to know if the only way I can live out the rest of my days living and loving and feeling is _this_.”

She held up her hand, watched it flare and pulse. The pain was near constant, these days, so she only really noticed its new heights if she truly paid attention.

“We thought that nothing could reverse tranquility, that it took something as unusual as this for it to even be possible. Now we know better. Maybe I won’t need this on me forever.”

“You’re not spirit-touched,” he told her, flatly.

“That’s a word I made up like five minutes ago. You don’t _know_.”

“You’re not a spirit healer. You don’t walk in the Fade consciously without my aid. The only spirit you wield is encased in metal and bound by the powers of another mage. I haven’t seen any spirits around you and _I would know_.”

“Would you?” she demanded. “Because once upon a time, you told me you didn’t know everything, so stop acting like you do!”

They froze, both breathing heavily from an argument that she hadn’t really realised was an argument until she noticed how loud her voice was. She was angry at him, partly because he didn’t have the answers, and partly because the ones he offered weren’t what she wanted. But why couldn’t she believe that it was the Creators that saved her, not Andraste or Justinia or whatever else people said? Why wouldn’t he let her have that?

She knew it was irrational, but that didn’t stop her from being angry.

“I know you resent the anchor, at times,” he told her quietly. “I am sorry that it is your burden to bear.”

“Yeah, so maybe you can see why I don’t want to feel _indebted_ to it the whole time,” she said, hurt in her voice. She stood up abruptly, which forced him backwards onto his heels, where he crouched before her on the ground. “You can’t blame me for looking for a way out of… of… all of this. Look, I’m going to go. This was stupid. I was feeling a little dazed about the whole thing - not every day you find out the true cause of the whole Mage-Templar War…”

“ _Lethallan_.”

“Sorry for bothering you,” she sounded petty to her own ears. “I thought you’d like to hear some more fun facts about spirits, to add to your collection, but I guess I got too _Dalish_ there for a second.”

His voice was _so fucking reasonable_ , as he said, “I understand that finding something out like this must be… overwhelming…”

“Solas, can you just stop?"

“...Excuse me?”

“Every day, I’m forced to have my hard work and my sacrifices attributed to a religion I don’t believe in or follow, and which, I’m now learning, actively screwed my life over time and time again. It hasn’t even occurred to anyone in the Inquisition that this might be the work of another god. I mean, Corypheus is plundering ancient elvhen ruins for _no reason_ , it’s not like the orb is elven and this all could’ve been the work of one or all of the Creators. Nooooo, absolutely not… I’m such a good Inquisitor, a good little Herald of Andraste. Everything I do I do in her name because I’ve got her to thank for getting my life back and I have to just forget that it was her servants that stole it from me in the first place.” She stopped her rant, nostrils flaring, “so maybe, _maybe_ , I’m getting a _little tired_ of having my beliefs shat on in my personal and private conversations as well.”

“ _Lethallan_ , be reasonable. You asked me a question, I gave you an answer. I didn’t mean-”

“ _Yes_ , you did. I already _know_ you think that none of it is true. Maybe the Creators never existed, or maybe they weren’t what we say they are, and maybe you’re right, and all of Dalish culture is a lie or a half-misremembered truth or just total bullshit, whatever you think. _I don’t care._ They _mean something to me._ That is what faith is: a personal connection to a belief that gives our lives meaning, and the Chantry doesn’t have that concept fucking patented! If I don’t have that, I don’t have my clan. I don’t have gods. Then I just have to accept that either a foreign god gave me this mark, or it was all just blind luck. And if I hadn’t caught the orb, nothing and no one would've saved me, and I would’ve just remained tranquil…”

She glared down at him, “so, you know what, Solas? You don’t understand. And maybe you never will.”

So.

It was having conversations like that that necessitated sneaking into the castle kitchens at midnight, looking for snacks.

Asha couldn’t sleep. She felt awful. Even if she wasn’t feeling both guilty and self-righteously pissed over her conversation with Solas, the discoveries of the day made the idea of sleep impossible. She knew she hadn’t really been angry at him, so much as the world at large. But she also didn’t feel like apologising. The man who constantly told her to question the received wisdom of her entire culture hadn’t been willing to hear her own theories for _five minutes_.

 _Mages who were once Tranquil lose all control over their emotions. They become irrational, unable to focus._ Cassandra recitation of clinical words from the Lord Seeker’s book echoed in her mind like a condemnation. Asha had forgotten to tell Solas about that particular revelation.

“It’s not like it’s nothing we didn’t know already,” she muttered. She’d been violated and abused, forced out of her own mind for over two years. _I think I have a right to be a little ‘irrational’ and angry_.

She began rummaging through the kitchen cupboards, for something - _anything_ \- involving sugar.

Her search, in the end, uncovered a metal tin with Orlesian script on it, filled with iced biscuits. Asha recognised them as the kind Josie would put out on trays for war room meetings, so it didn’t feel too much like stealing for her to pry it open and take four for herself. She was just beginning to brew a pot of tea when movement and the sound of the door creaking open caused her to jump.

“Sorry, am I allowed to-” she spun and saw Cullen standing there, equally surprised to find her in the otherwise empty room. 

“Asha, my apologies for disturbing you,” he said, in a weary voice. He looked about as bad as she felt. “And I assume so - at least, I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“Are you here cause you can’t sleep either?” she asked, as he moved into the room, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and began searching the cupboards in a confident way that told her this was a regular occurrence.

“Yes, I suppose.”

“Want some tea?”

He glanced over at her, “no, thank you. I was, um, looking for something else-”

She gave him a long, hard look, and then tsked. “You haven’t eaten yet, have you?” she sighed. Even she had managed to catch a meal from the staff mess after the exertion of all that yelling at Solas. She took the tin from the sideboard and handed it to him, “have a biscuit.”

He looked at the box, unconvinced. “And sugar at this time is supposed to help you sleep... how, exactly?”

“I don’t know, but they’re really good,” she said with a shrug, deciding not to point out that, when he said things like that, he sounded like someone’s dowager aunt. She stretched up on tiptoes to open the cupboard next to her in search of mugs, but found only saucepans.

Cullen moved two cupboards to her left, opened it, took out a mug and handed it to her wordlessly. Then he moved one more over again, and fished out a ceramic teapot. She took them both from him and placed them on the side. “So, care to give me the insomniac’s grand tour of the kitchen?”

“I’d rather not,” he said, though he gave her jibe a small smile of acknowledgement. “I really am rather hungry, Inquisitor.”

“I gave you biscuits, Commander, I don’t know what else you want from me.”

She turned back to watch the kettle on the stove, eager to catch it before the shrieking whistle woke half the castle. She became absorbed in her task, nibbling on the edge of a biscuit, as Cullen moved around her. By the time she had one serviceable cup of tea, he had a plate full of bread and leftovers - a testament to exactly how much he must know his way around the space.

“So, why can’t you sleep?” he asked, suddenly. It surprised her. The silence had been companionable, not awkward. She’d decided it was perhaps best to just keep out of his way, if he was tired.

“...Cass found out some stuff, about the Seekers,” she admitted, moving the kettle and filling the teapot once it was warmed through. “Has she already told you?”

“I’ve only just found out she’s left her rooms. She said she wanted to speak with me tomorrow.”

“I guess I’ll leave it to her, then. I don’t have the energy to repeat it. What about you?” she asked, hoping to turn the conversation away from herself, “is this just standard lyrium stuff, or is there another reason?”

“‘Just standard lyrium stuff’,” he replied, a note of dry amusement in his voice.

“Oh. I could do the thing again? The tranquil aura thing. After you’ve eaten, obviously. It seemed to work last time.”

“No, thank you,” he said, a little abruptly. “That is, sleep is not quite as crucial as it was in those circumstances, and…”

“And relying on a spell is still relying on something?” It was a bit of a stab in the dark, but she could tell from the look on his face that she’d struck at the heart of the issue. “Fair enough. The offer’s always there, if you want it!”

With that, she picked up her remaining three biscuits and planned to make a hasty retreat to… 

Well, she couldn’t go to the library, actually, because she didn’t want to risk running into Solas. And Ellana was asleep in her room, and it was a little too cold to go out to the balcony…

“Asha,” she had already paused by the door, stuck in indecision, but his voice made her turn. “I - forgive me if this request seems untoward - but would you like some company? I still have to eat this, and I’ve found that talking with someone often takes my mind off things. We could… play chess?”

“Chess?” she blinked at him in surprise. She’d never played chess, although she thought she knew the rules now from tracking Bull and Solas’ moves in their imaginary games. 

Well, if there was anything in the world that was likely to distract her, and equally likely to send her to sleep… “Sure! Why not?”

Cullen startled, like it was the last thing he’d expected her to say - though why had he offered then, she wondered? Rather awkwardly, he led her back up to her office, nodding to the guards on night patrol as they walked across the battlements. The sky above was cloudless and filled with stars and Asha couldn’t help and stop and admire them for a moment, before moving into the room and clearing a space on his desk for their plates while he looked around for his chessboard.

“You play with Dorian, right?” she asked, to fill up the silence, as he cleared more papers out of the way and began arranging the pieces. 

“And Leliana,” he said. He glanced up at her, “they both cheat.”

“You shock me. I am _shocked_. You should get them to play each other.”

“Dorian’s... not very good at cheating. Leliana would win.”

“Well, there will be no cheating from me,” she vowed, hand to heart. “Mostly because I have barely a clue what I’m doing. So go easy on me... Can you go ‘easy’ in chess? Is there a beginners’ version? With like, less pieces, or something?”

“...I’ll try not to defeat you in three moves, how does that sound?”

“Keep talking like that, and maybe even chess will result in broken ribs,” she told him, taking a bite from her biscuit and a long sip of tea while he chuckled.

Asha was about as good at chess as she expected to be… as in: _not very good_. A lot of her early moves were just guesses, and she could tell that Cullen didn’t take advantage of them. Several times he reached to move one piece, before hesitating with a frown, and moving another instead, often to avoid taking one of her pieces off the board. It looked like he was fighting his instincts, indeed preventing the game from resulting in an immediate defeat.

But that meant she soon discovered one saving grace. While she wasn’t very good at chess, she prided herself on being very good at card games. And the Commander had tells - some really, _really_ obvious ones. 

For one thing, although he ate his meal when it was her turn to play, he constantly looked at her pieces when she was choosing which move to make, clearly eyeing up all the potential choices. She found that the longer she drew out her own indecision, humming over what to do and making him impatient, the more his eyes roamed around the board in ways that told her what _he_ would do, in her situation. 

So she started just… doing that.

She tracked the way his eyes flickered across the board, and guessed that he was expecting her - if she was a skilled player - to move her mage. When she picked up the piece, he drew in a quick, almost imperceptible breath, confirming her suspicions. Asha stared around the board and saw that the mage was actually in a position to claim a pawn that… was about to threaten her Arishok. Huh. She hadn’t noticed that. She moved the mage.

“Is this your first time playing?” he asked, and she couldn’t fight a grin, because his voice sounded so falsely nonchalant that she could tell she’d demonstrated an unexpected skill.

“Yes,” she replied, hoping her face was better at hiding the source of her victory than his was. “Although Bull and Solas kind of do this… virtual chess game? I didn’t really understand the early games, but once Solas explained what a board would look like I’ve been able to keep track of their plays a bit better. Their current game has been going ever since we left the Western Approach. Where did you learn?”

“From my sister.”

“Which one? Mia or… Rosalie?”

“You remember their names?”

Why wouldn’t she? Ah, yes - because she’d been shitfaced when he told her about them. “Unfortunately for me, I still remember all of that conversation.”

“All of it?”

“Well, up to leaving the tavern,” she admitted. “Which means I remember every time I insulted you... but also the names of your sisters!”

“Don’t worry about me, Inquisitor. I can withstand your insults, by this point.” He moved one of his pawns. “Your turn.”

“Yes, Commander, you are the very paragon of virtue, putting up with little old me,” she sighed, running a hand through her hair and leaning forward to make a show of examining the board. When she risked a glance upwards to see what play he thought she should make, she jumped to find his eyes on her, not the chess pieces. She looked down again hastily, wondering if her strategy was foiled. To turn his attention away from her, she asked again, “so, which sister was it?”

“Mia. The elder. She liked having an easy target after being defeated by our father. She would get this stuck-up grin whenever she won. Which was all the time.”

“A woman after my own heart,” Asha joked, knowing that she had a very particular type of smile whenever she won her sparring matches.

“My brother and I practised together for weeks. The look on her face the day I finally won…”

The pensive look hit him again, as he began to examine the board. Asha waited a few seconds, before brushing a finger up against her queen. He frowned slightly - so that was a… bad move. She knew the Queen was important, so that made sense. She moved her hand one place forward, to the pawn that stood in front of it. It seemed like that was the piece. 

Was this cheating? She wasn’t quite sure, but she decided to wait a couple of seconds before moving it, in case he caught on too quick. “You have a brother too?” she prompted.

“Bran,” he told her.

“Older or younger.”

“Younger.”

“Poor Bran.”

He frowned, “What do you mean?” 

_What had she meant?_ It had just kind of slipped out. “I just meant… Ferelden still works on ‘an oldest son inherits’ situation, right? Plus, you’re that kind of elder child that’s good at everything. Must’ve been a hard act to follow.”

She didn’t say that, unless the Rutherfords were incredibly attractive and Bran had also inherited some devilish good looks, being Cullen’s little brother would be utter torture.

“‘Good at everything’?” he sputtered.

She moved her pawn, then gestured at the chess board, at him, and then at the office in general. “Mmhmm. And your utter obedience to authority tells me you were probably an unbearably well-behaved son. Your turn.”

“Well, that’s -” he scoffed, “I shall keep Ellana in my prayers, then. If I am the bane of my brother’s existence, her suffering must be all the greater.”

“Aww,” she grinned, eating another cookie. “But you forget, of course: Ellana is perfect in every way. I was the kind of elder sibling who fucks up so that the younger child can sail through life.” When he gave her a disbelieving look she said, “it’s true! Do you know what a younger sibling can get away with, when their sister called down a thunderstorm on someone’s wedding ceremony when she was six, because she was jealous of the bride’s pretty dress? Thank the gods I have magic, honestly, otherwise I’d have no kind of upper hand”

“Well, in my case, I left for the templar order at thirteen. Which means Bran inherits. And I didn’t plague my siblings’ lives for too long.”

“Oh,” she knew he was continuing their joking, but the way he worded it, it sounded almost sad. “They must miss you. And your parents - they didn’t get to watch you grow up, all locked up in templar school. Have you seen them much since joining the Inquisition?”

“They moved to South Reach after the Blight,” Cullen frowned, not at the board, but the statement of that fact. “...I will admit I do not write to them as often as I should.”

Asha gave him an unimpressed look as he moved his Arishok across the table. “...As the orphan who recently reunited with a sister I long thought was dead, you know, of course, what I’m going to say to that.”

“Of course, Inquisitor.”

“Do they at least know you survived Kirkwall?”

“Of course they do!”

“Adamant? Haven?”

“...Ah.”

The game continued. Asha made a few utterly random moves to throw Cullen off her scent in terms of her tactics, but those led to her sustaining some substantial losses. The bonus: with less of her pieces on the board, it became increasingly obvious what the Commander expected her to do. She knew she was bound to lose, but was glad that they’d drawn out the distraction as long as they had. And it was pretty distracting, trying to play a chess game via the facial expressions of the other player.

Seriously, how did this man look this good on what she assumed must be less than four or five hours of sleep a night? Had his parents secretly made a deal with some kind of demon? It was absolutely a crime.

One way or another, she became utterly absorbed, and also found she kept having to remind Cullen to eat from the plate that sat mostly untouched next to the board.

“I - how did you -” Asha couldn’t fight a grin at Cullen’s outrage as she swept his remaining mage of the board with her Arishok. His shoulders had tensed up as if bracing for a blow every single time she’d put her hand near that piece, though it had taken her a round of gameplay to work out why it packed such a punch. “I was just about to take your king!”

“Really?” Asha replied in her most innocent voice. Which was pretty easy, because she’d been utterly clueless to the fact.

“You lied to me, you _have_ played before!”

“No, I really, really haven’t!”

“Then, how are you-”

“I’ll tell you all my secrets after the game is over, Cullen,” she said primly. “It’s no fun if you know while we’re playing.”

“...You’re cheating, aren’t you?”

She raised a quizzical eyebrow, hoping for her best Diamondback face. “I mean, if you believe that’s the only way I could possibly win…”

“Oh, you’re not going to _win_ , Inquisitor.”

The confidence in his voice startled an incredulous laugh out of her. “Wow. How is your trash talk better when you play _chess_?”

He smiled a little self-consciously, like the outburst had surprised him as well, and then played his next move. “You know,” he said, almost hesitant, “this may be the longest we’ve gone without discussing the Inquisition - or related matters.”

“Not to brag, but I think it’s also a personal record for me not yelling at you,” she smirked, as she turned her attention to the board. There really weren’t many of her pieces left, and her king certainly looked vulnerable, which she knew was a… bad thing.

“Will wonders never cease?”

“Oooh, some more sass from the Commander,” she grinned, “try not to get too comfortable.”

“Joking aside, I hope this at least offers… a satisfactory distraction. Perhaps even a welcome one.”

 _It was._ And that sudden realisation of the obvious truth made Asha freeze, as her hand hovered above her queen. She was really enjoying herself; and it was entirely because of the company. It wasn’t like she had been desperate to play a game of chess - she’d half been hoping it would send her to sleep. She could’ve played for a polite half hour and then rapidly lost and excused herself. But Cullen’s patience and careful playstyle had drawn her in, and his reactions to her gambits were so hilarious she had to keep triggering them. She was drawing the game out, trying to rile him and impress him, and she was… having fun…

With him.

After taking a moment to assess her feelings on that, she realised it… scared her. She’d told Cullen they were friends because it was tiring for him to be treading on eggshells around her all the time, but she’d never tried to claim that they were close. And yet, she’d been feeling awful ever since she walked out of Solas’ room, and now she was smiling. Because of him. And now they were… she was…

She glanced up at him. He was smiling at her, but everything about it was heartbreakingly uncertain. He was no doubt waiting for her to either make a joke, or perhaps simply reassure him that she didn’t hate his company. Even though he was obviously tired, he looked… pleased to have her there, with him. Happy… to have her there. With him.

Them. Together.

 _I can’t_. 

The words came up like a defensive wall in her mind. A rush of energy punched through her, a thrill of self-preservation. _Can't_ … what? She didn’t know. It was just an instinctive flare of fear that rushed through her, though she didn’t quite understand its source. 

But... he was still a _templar_. After today’s revelations… how could she…?

“Cullen,” she said, hating her voice as it came out of her, utterly different from her joking tone only thirty seconds before. As the words formed in her mouth, she could already picture the hurt and pain they would trigger in his face, which was currently so full of tentative camaraderie and something that looked a little like hope.

But she couldn’t stop them. They flooded out anyway.

“How many people have you made tranquil?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Taylor Swift - 'This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things' plays in the background*
> 
> Sorry guys, this was a loooong, intense chapter, ending on an intense emotional cliffhanger! But this conversation is one that needs to happen, and who knows! Maybe it might NOT be a total car crash!
> 
> At least we'll always have mildly flirty chess :)


	57. Chapter Fifty-Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The most painful conversation of Cullen's Rutherfords life begins.

“How many people have you made tranquil?”

As she predicted, Cullen’s face immediately shuttered, dismayed and crestfallen. “So,” he said, quietly. He cleared his throat, looking down at the board, “when you warned me ‘not to get too comfortable,’ you very much meant it.”

The office was now entirely quiet, the silence tense where it had once been companionable. Asha couldn’t quite believe she’d asked him something so directly. Or why she suddenly had to know. That was the kind of question she should’ve thought to ask when they first met and she was trying to antagonise him, wielding it against him like a knife in those early days. But she hadn’t asked it now out of spite. 

Why couldn’t she have just… kept playing, and then politely and quietly walked away? Why was it suddenly so important to her?

She blindly moved her queen forward, certain it wouldn’t help her chances of winning the game in the slightest. But it would at least signal to him that she wanted to keep playing. She looked up at him, wondering if he got the message, but saw he was once more looking anywhere but at her. “Sorry,” she said, her voice equally quiet, because for some reason part of her felt awful for causing him pain. “I know it’s not an easy question.”

Her apology surprised him. He looked back and saw the queen moved. He glanced up at her, confused, and she gestured at the board. “Your turn.” She paused, and added, “I think I just fucked up.”

She glanced down at her queen to show she meant in the game, but she hoped her wording was deliberately reassuring. 

“...It’s _not_ an easy question,” he sighed, running his hand through his hair and then dragging it down his face. He trained his attention on the board, “and I don’t think you’ll like the answer.”

"I'd still like to hear it."

He moved his Arishok, and with it silently dispatched her last Arishok from the board. Then he replied, still not looking at her. “None.”

“None?” Asha echoed. She was surprised. And she knew that it showed on her face, and hurt him all over again, because it confirmed that she’d expected him to have several Rites of Tranquility under his belt, like they were templar badges of honour. Though why she would be sitting here, if she’d thought that was the case, even she couldn’t answer.

“The practice of the Rite was something kept deliberately secret within Circles,” he said, in a factual, clinical tone, like he was reciting from a history book. “Whether or not that’s entirely true in practice, it’s a restriction that was put in place and designed to... prevent abuses. Only a select few know how to perform it: typically you have an arcanist, like Dagna, with knowledge of how to prepare the brand, and then four or five senior templars or a Seeker to, well…”

“...Oh.” She supposed that fell more in line with the conspiracies surrounding tranquility that they’d read in Cassandra’s book.

“Tranquil numbers are carefully monitored, to avoid too many accusations of it being an abuse of power. Even at its worst, Kirkwall only had… well, I think it was just over thirty. I never reached the rank where I could be trusted with such things. It’s your turn, Inquisitor.”

She looked down at the board, a little flustered. She honestly didn’t know what to do, and she could hardly wait for his body language to tell her now that he was entirely closed off. No - now that she'd flamed the shutters down on his tentative relaxation. Well, she'd fend for herself, then. She kept the pieces that were guarding her king, and blindly reached out for a tower-

“But - you see - in Kinloch Hold, I was a guard,” he continued, suddenly, making her jump and almost knock the piece over. “Alongside my duties watching over the students, I - I was present at Harrowings. It was my job to cut the mage down, should they get possessed. Which I suppose isn’t that different from performing a Rite.”

“Oh. Did you-”

“No. It is very rare for a mage to fail a Harrowing, and I was not there long enough to have the chance. Though make no mistake: I killed many mages in my time in Kinloch.” He continued, his voice mercilessly direct, “as Knight Commander in Kirkwall, before I was moved predominantly to desk duty, I hunted apostates and brought them back to the Circle. I knew what would happen to them, if it was their second or third attempt at escape. I escorted them to their trials. I didn’t question what happened to them behind closed doors.”

“Cullen-”

“So, my hands are far from clean, if that’s what you’re asking, Inquisitor.” The title didn’t have the teasing lilt that was now typically adopted, but he wasn’t… angry. His voice just sounded… cold and detached. 

Hurt. He was hurt. And absolutely _full_ of self-loathing. He continued, with a grimace. “You heard the way I said it - ‘only thirty’. ‘Only’ thirty tranquil. That’s still thirty people with families, and friends, and lovers, and we still deemed _that_ restraint. I didn’t enact tranquility on anyone, but I saw tranquils every day. We all knew what happened during the Rite. We were all complicit. And there was definitely a time when I thought it was the right thing - the safest thing -”

Asha moved the tower and took out another one of his pieces, nearly swiping it off the board. “Why?”

“Because I-” he blinked and quickly shut his mouth, startled by his automatic response to her question. His mouth clamped into a tight line, stopping himself from answering.

She picked up the Arishok and plopped it in his pile of defeated pieces. “It’s your turn,” she prompted.

He looked down at the board as if it had magically materialised from thin air, clearly having forgotten about the game once more. Then he sighed, looking almost ready to put his head in his hands. He wouldn’t, though, no matter how much he despaired at her - that would be a breach in decorum. 

“Inquisitor - why are you still here?”

Asha bit her lip, uncertain how to respond. Her stomach clenched almost painfully, and she couldn’t work out why. Was it fear? But she wasn’t afraid. 

No, she _had_ been afraid, a moment ago, but... not of him. Something was making her blindly fearful, some reflex buried deep under her skin. _Why was she here?_

“Because a friend invited me here to play chess,” she said, finally. “And because I asked a horrible question - _two_ horrible questions - and I’m sorry, but I _need_ to know the answers.”

The room fell silent again. Cullen moved another piece, and her tower was removed from the board.

“When I was at Kinloch Hold, there was… an uprising,” he said. “Blood mages took over the Circle tower. They held it for nearly three days before the Hero of Ferelden came and freed us. By the end, all my friends were dead.”

“Well… fuck.” Asha replied. “...Where were you?”

“‘Freed _us_ ’, Inquisitor - I was in the tower too. It was my first placement.” 

_“Because it’s familiar.”_ she was reminded of his words, the night before the battle at Adamant, as he explained his fear of blood mages and a force torn apart from the inside by demons.

“I hunkered down in a room besieged by demons - I was lucky to be rescued. The things they showed me… at the time, I blamed the mages, and did so for years after. Now, I realise… that demons only exploit the weaknesses we already have within ourselves. The mages were not entirely to blame.” 

“I mean, they’re the ones who called the demons in to feast and laid out a templar banquet,” Asha replied, and then froze. “Gods, sorry, that was so fucking crass. I’ll just…” she blindly moved another chess piece. “So that’s why you hated mages when you were in Kirkwall? Sid said you used to be a fanatic.”

He tilted his head then, and she realised she’d never admitted the insight the Champion of Kirkwall had given into his character before. “Her words,” she hastily clarified, “Not mine.”

“And I suppose they’re true,” he admitted. He didn’t even look at the board this time as he took out the piece she’d just moved. It was her queen.

“Fuck!” Asha said, and was then mortified by her reaction to a bad chess move, in the middle of a deep, emotionally-fraught conversation. Cullen was looking up at her, a little bemused, and she frantically said, “sorry, that wasn't about you being a fanatic or anything! I just... didn’t mean to move that piece. That was really fucking stupid.”

“You’re worried… about the game?”

“Well, yes!” she said, then fidgeted and mumbled, “I’m not saying I’m _proud_ of it… sorry. Please continue.”

“...What Sidonie says is the truth. When I arrived in Kirkwall, I hated mages. Or rather, I thought I hated them because I was simply full of hatred. And pain.” he told her. “The templar solution to failure and to doubts is more training, and, ultimately, more lyrium. They give you power in the hope that it allows you to regain the illusion of control. Obviously, in many cases, that simply breeds more hatred, and more violence. I was young, and angry, and I wanted to believe that I had survived Kinloch when all my friends perished for a reason: because I was stronger, because I had a purpose, not because I was merely lucky where they were not.”

“Wow,” she waggled the fingers of her anchored hand at him, before plucking up another piece, “same.”

Cullen frowned for a second, and she thought it might be for drawing a parallel between their two situations, before he said, tentatively, “you… do realise that you’ll be leaving your king open?”

“I’m deciding to go out in a suicidal blaze of glory, in honour of this conversation,” she replied, with a small grin she hoped he wouldn’t find inappropriate. She moved the piece and took out Cullen’s queen. “...Check? Is that what I say now? Is this a check situation?”

“I… believe it is,” he replied, mildly surprised.

“Fuck yeah!” she punched the air with her anchored hand. When she saw him watching her, she tried to arrange herself in a more serious manner. “Sorry. I… might quite enjoy chess. So, what changed? You clearly don’t hate mages anymore - at least, I really, really hope not.”

“I feel like we’ve already established that particular fact, multiple times over.”

“Hey, it’s always nice to check in. Like you don’t take measurements of my templar-related emotions daily.”

“When we have conversations like this, I can’t help but think that that’s partly for self-preservation...”

“Isn’t it just?” she replied, pointedly.

“... _Touché_.” he said, looking down. “There were a lot of blood mages in Kirkwall. There were also a lot of innocent people. As I watched the line between the two blur for my colleagues… I’m ashamed to say that it took atrocities, and too many of them, for me to take a more nuanced approach to the problem. Sidonie is right, in many ways, to hate me - the way she held the Order to account and desperately tried to get them to listen… I may not always have liked her methods, but I never blamed her for using them, in that awful place. And I was… useless. Blinded first by hate, and then the beginnings of a lyrium addiction I didn’t know how to keep under control. Meredith saw my reliance on lyrium, relegated me to desk duty, and cut back my supply. I stayed hidden from the worst of things while struggling with the reduced dosage. But all I felt was shame - that I wasn’t considered strong enough to tackle the true problems, that I was held back from the frontlines. By the time I got there and saw what I really should’ve been fighting all along, I was almost too late, and that frankly is as good as not having done anything at all.”

It was a long speech. He’d clearly thought a lot about his actions, almost as much as Asha had interrogated her own. She coughed, and said, “So... now you’re here.”

“Now I’m here,” he muttered. “Another chance I don’t really deserve, but Maker knows I at least have the good graces not to squander this one.”

There was a long silence after that. Cullen stared down at the board but gave no impression of actually seeing it. And Asha… she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t think his explanation absolved him entirely, but she also didn’t think she could bear to rake him across the coals again. Why would she, when her words had left him looking so wretchedly sad? 

She wasn’t his confessor - she wasn’t responsible for cataloguing his mistakes. He clearly did enough of that himself. 

And she understood, didn’t she? What it was like to try and make sense of something senselessly awful when it happened to you, and you against all odds survived? The hatred, the _anger_...

Again, that strangely defensive feeling rose up in her chest. Part of her wanted to dismissively hate him, push him away - the same part of her that had panicked when he explained lyrium to her. She instinctively didn’t _want_ to sympathise with him, almost out of an instinct to protect herself. But then she thought... if the interrogation had been the other way round, if he’d asked her why she hated templars and demanded her to lay out her history in excruciating detail…

If he was trying his best to change, what good did it do to punish him further?

“Why aren’t you playing?” she asked, startling him and causing him to look up at her, like he'd already expecting her to be walking out of the room. “It’s your move.”

“Oh, I-” he looked down at the board, and then moved his tower and claimed her king. “I win.”

“Well,” she smiled, “I like to think I put up a good fight, with all my amazingly intelligent chess moves, and intensely personal questions throwing you off your game. Fancy another round?”

He looked at her incredulously as if she’d just proposed something completely unthinkable, like a naked lap running around Skyhold’s ramparts. “Oh, maybe it’s too late?” she said, feigning nonchalance as she looked up at the clock, which told her she was really going to be regretting whatever time she woke up the next morning, “sorry, but I’m still in need of a distraction. If you’d rather stop and get some sleep, I can get myself out of your hair, if you want?”

“No, I.. not at all…” Cullen began scrambling to collect his pieces, “do you actually - ah - want to?”

“No, Commander. I don’t. You’ve uncovered my deepest, darkest secret: I indulge in some very specific chess-based masochism. Please don’t tell Bull, he’s been trying to find out what makes me tick for ages, and I’d honestly never live it down,” she said dryly, and then grinned when his entire face went bright, bright red. “Of course I want to play again. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”

“But - I just-”

“- Told me why you used to hate mages?” she finished for him, “well, I’m not exactly going to agree with you. But I never was, was I? _You_ don’t even agree with you anymore. I’d much rather go back to playing chess and listen to your adorable attempts at sass.”

“I… I thought you wouldn't want to have anything to do with me, after hearing that story,” he admitted. She was surprised he let the word ‘adorable’ slide.

“Well, then, that would make me a terrible manager and an absolutely, abominably shitty friend,” she said, trying to keep her voice reasonable. “I asked you a question - you answered. Now I’m no longer worried that you fantasise about killing me in my sleep.”

His face went even deeper red then, and he began hurriedly placing the pieces back on the board. Asha was going to leave it at that, achieving the awkward transition out of a travesty of a conversation she’d for some reason initiated. 

Which was why she surprised even herself when her hand reached out, almost of its own accord, and grabbed his arm. “Cullen.”

He froze, his hands stilling, and looked up at her. Again, he seemed almost braced for a blow. The moment seemed to stretch out a little too long for it to not feel… strange. Honestly, she was a little at a loss of what she wanted to do right then, as well. Say sorry? Say… something?

“Thank you for answering my questions honestly,” she said finally, trying her best to make her lame words sound sincere, “I know that the truth isn’t always easy.”

Asha woke up in her own bed, nearly face down in her pillow.

Which was worrying, because she… didn’t remember coming back to her room. 

And this time, she hadn’t had any alcohol.

From her vague and slightly sleep-deprived memories of the early hours of that morning, she remembered starting a second round of chess with Cullen, hastily pulling them back onto much safer topics of conversation. But she’d only made it about halfway through before tracking his movements to see what plays he seemed to fear became hard, and her eyelids turned heavy. 

Creators, had she fallen asleep in his office? 

If she’d literally asked the man to bear his soul to her, then unceremoniously faceplanted onto his fucking chessboard barely an hour later, she could no longer blame her status as a terrible person solely on the influence of drink.

Had Cullen… carried her back to her room? 

The thought sent a feeling of sudden vertigo rushing through her and she shoved herself up to sitting, hair a tangled mess around her head as she looked around. Yes, this was her room. Ellana’s side of the bed was empty and cold, telling her that her sister had left a while ago. She was in yesterday’s clothes, though yesterday’s pins had all been removed from her hair and placed on the bedside table. And… yes, all her clothes from the last five days were still strewn across the floor in puddles where she’d simply discarded them, including her gross, sweaty sparring outfits.

“Oh… my… gods…” she muttered, in mortification.

Solas had said she was too heavy for him to carry. Cullen apparently didn’t have that problem.

“Oh my gods!” she shrieked, scrambling up out of bed before her brain did anything too wayward with that knowledge. Why hadn’t he woke her up? Why hadn’t he let her sleep on his desk? 

The answer: because he was far, far too polite. And she was a menace. That poor man. 

_Why did you even ask that question in the first place?_ With Cassandra, she just avoided all topics that would lead to arguments, like the mage-templar war and the Maker, and instead steered conversations towards the subject of punching people, or the plots of trashy romance novels she couldn’t yet read. Why couldn’t she have just kept teasing the Commander over his terrible hobbies and awkward demeanour, rather than interrogating his past?

But it seemed like even contemplating the answer to _that_ question caused her stomach to swoop painfully, like she was looking down from a great height and imagining a very messy fall.

She needed to get to an Inquisition meeting by midday, and the sun was already pretty high in the sky. A glance at her clock told her she had just over forty minutes before it started. Rather than think about the issue further, she bundled up a fresh set of clothes and sprinted down to the baths, desperate to make herself presentable. She was just rushing back up from the basement, freshly washed and in clean clothes, when she ran into Ellana coming in the other direction, grimy and covered in sweat. Clearly, while Asha had slept in, her sister had actually managed to make it to her own sparring practice. Asha only felt a little guilty - her only sparring partners now were Cullen and Cassandra, and she thought that given the fallout of yesterday’s events neither of them would exactly be at the training ground.

Ellana took one look at her, in her steam-flushed and flustered state, and raised a single eyebrow. “ _You know_ ,” she said in elvhen, “ _the times when you used to pass out and get carried home by beautiful men were a lot more exciting, featured a lot more alcohol and less…_ ” she frowned and switched back, unable to find a suitable word, “chess.”

“Thank the gods, you know what happened,” Asha said, her voice heavy with relief. There was a witness, even if that witness would never let her hear the end of it.

“I nearly startled that poor man to death,” Ellana told her, pulling her into an alcove on the staircase landing, “either he was hoping very much to be in the other half of your bed, or our sleeping arrangements are a little more Dalish than he was expecting. Possibly both. If you need me to move out into separate quarters...”

“ _There’s no bedsharing! Hypothetical or otherwise!_ ” Asha said, frantically switching back to elvhen before her face burst into flames. “ _What even happened?_ ”

“ _The Commander carried you back to your room in those lovely big strong arms of his, then nearly wet himself when he lifted up the covers and found me under them instead_ ,” El told her. “ _I woke up, extremely confused, and about to be impressed by your tenacity, before he explained that you’d just fallen asleep at his desk. Rather than waking up and explaining yourself, you remained dead to the world. We took out your hairpins and tucked you in. And you… snored… a lot._ ”

“Mythal’s tits,” Asha muttered. At least Ellana slept in clothes, given that they were currently sharing a room. She didn’t think Cullen would be able to function if he'd seen her sister naked.

“ _You need to buy that man a drink, or something,_ ” Ellana told her, “ _I think you’ve kind of been torturing him_.”

Asha nodded, a little shamefaced. She knew she’d been torturing him - she’d been there during that awful conversation last night! Not to mention his ribs! “I know. I’m the worst!”

“ _Do you... like him? Fancy him? You’re usually only this useless when you like them back._ ”

“Don’t be silly!” Asha hissed in her ear, “of course I don’t! He’s a _templar_!”

Only, that excuse rang a little hollow, now. It wasn’t like he was a _proud_ templar - his relationship with the Order was far more complicated than she ever could have imagined. Not that that changed anything - and not that it was an _’excuse’_ , in the first place. Cullen was a templar, and she didn’t fancy him - the two things weren’t mutually exclusive. Yes, she was interested in men, and also a woman in possession of working eyes, which meant she knew that he was very attractive, with his stupidly perfect blonde hair and honey-gold eyes, but…

The bells chimed, somewhere further up in Skyhold’s own small Chantry.

“Shit! I’m late for my meeting!” she said, kissing her sister on the cheek and sprinting up the stairs two at a time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See, there's light at the end of the tunnel 😇 😇 😇 
> 
> Obviously, all tweaks to Cullen's backstory are my own. A desperate attempt to 1. understand how the Rite of Tranquility even works, because my worldbuilding deep dive keeps dredging up basically nothing (but I'm assuming templars can't all know the Rite and keep flinging it at people, otherwise the Tranquil Solution would probably have happened a lot earlier). And 2. to fill in the gaps in how Cullen is even in the Inquisition. I think the templars giving themselves lyrium to cope with trauma and that Going Badly is about what I'd expect from the fucked-up nature of the Order, right? 
> 
> I'm not an apologist, I think canon Cullen has a bunch of extremely problematic flaws that I don't think are adequately explained or justified in the game. So... I guess this chapter (and this fic) is me wishing the writing held him a little more accountable, without giving him literally no chance to continue redeeming himself. Hope people enjoyed it xx


	58. Chapter Fifty-Eight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dance lessons in Skyhold.

“You’re not meditating anymore.”

Asha glanced up to see Solas approaching her on the battlements. It was a beautiful day, crystal clear skies, with a bird of prey swooping over the valley ahead.

“Keeping tabs on me?” she asked, keeping her voice bland and neutral. It had been just over a week since their strange and rather sudden argument, but she hadn’t apologised. She didn’t know why. Something about the whole situation still made her feel hurt and angry. “I assume Cole told you.”

“He said you’ve decided ‘no longer to stay still’.”

“Sounds about right.”

She’d explained to the spirit that she was no longer planning on meditating daily. Her willpower was now strong enough to maintain a barrier for nearly a minute before it dispersed, and her mana was as strong as it was ever going to be with supplementing it with lyrium. Meditating hadn’t given her any special insight into what plagued her mind - no more than her nightmares did, really. Asha didn’t need to do it anymore, and what’s more she didn’t want to.

But she still really liked Cole’s company. So now they had tea every morning on the tower roof after practice instead. The spirit liked the taste of an Orlesian black tea with orange flavours, particularly when sweetened with honey. 

“Do you think that’s wise?”

“Cassandra said that it was months of silent contemplation that forced her into a tranquil state as part of her Seeker training,” she replied, “so… frankly, _fuck_ that.”

“...Ah.”

Solas was the only person Asha had told about the findings at Caer Oswin - although she figured Cole knew, given that no one’s thoughts had been quiet on the subject. Asha also knew Cassandra had told the advisors. All it had taken was walking into that war room meeting late, seeing Cullen’s look of understanding. _I now know why you suddenly interrogated me for no reason in the middle of the night_ was written there clear as day.

They were keeping it a secret. Asha had wondered if Leliana and Cass were trying to protect the Chantry, until the Nightingale pointed out that, if nothing else, it was excellent blackmail material for the Inquisition to have a monopoly on.

“I’m not like you, Solas,” she said, finally. “We can’t all be _somniari_. For you, meditation takes you somewhere else. All it gives me is darkness.”

And ever since that book’s clinical tone about the side effects of recovering mages, how ‘irrational’ and ‘out of control’ they were after tranquility, she was finding the idea of treating her emotions as weakness less and less appealing.

“I actually wanted to talk to you about that,” he said. “I know that you have just returned home, but I… my friend is in trouble.”

“Your friend? Someone outside the Inquisition?”

“Shockingly, I do know _some_ ,” he said, with a taut, self-deprecating smile. “My friend has been captured by mages, forced into slavery. I heard the cry for help in my sleep.”

_Mages… slavery?_ “I - Solas, I’ll help in any way I can, but Tevinter is very far away. We could get in touch with Hawke? Maybe Dorian can give us some contacts for Leliana to use?”

“No, you misunderstand. It is trapped in the Dales.”

“...It?”

“A spirit of wisdom - that is, my friend. My friend is a spirit.”

“Right, of course it is.” Kind of standard fare, for Solas, at this point. “Well, did you see what happened? When they… Wisdom - is it’s name Wisdom? - got captured? Is it the Venatori?”

“I do not know,” Solas told her. “All that I could ascertain from my dream is that it was summoned into our world against its will. It was happy where it was, now it is displaced to a foreign land, and the binds placed on it cause extreme pain. It wishes for my help, to return safely to the Fade. All I have is its location.”

“And you’d travel there on your own without me, if I couldn’t go?” at his nod, she sighed. “Well, it’s not every day that the things I stuff back into the Fade actually want to go there, and it’s not every day that you ask me for help. I’ll talk to Cullen about it. I think he’s already putting Inquisition troops into the Dales, as part of whatever deal we made with Gaspard. Maybe we can accompany them under the guise of getting settled in.”

“Thank you, Asha,” Solas said. “I... realise I’m saddling you with merely another burden.”

“Solas, I’ll probably never say these words again to you, so let me savour them: don’t be stupid. You’re my _friend_. I care about you. Of course I’ll help, in whatever way I can.”

She discussed it with Cullen over a chess game later that day, enjoying the sun in the small, half-wild courtyard that she’d never actually finished weeding. They’d played twice in the week following their first game, both on Asha’s insistence, so that she could try and repair the damage bringing up his past had potentially done to their relationship. It was also… pretty enjoyable. The Commander had forgotten her promise to reveal why some of her moves actually worked, and now that she was actually paying attention to the choices she made based on his cues, she was inadvertently learning _strategy_.

She’d seen Dorian raise an eyebrow at her as he strolled past and found her in his usual seat, and just shrugged helplessly in response. She didn’t quite understand it either. She figured she must just be seriously starved for leisure time, if she was now actually finding this to be the most pleasing diversion in her day.

“Well, we’ll miss you,” said the Commander in a heavy voice, after she explained the situation. At his admission, something squeezed in her chest, even though it was something anyone would say in that situation, the most cordial of empty platitudes.

She was going to be forced to leave Ellana again, she supposed. Whereas before Adamant she’d been restless and desperate for travel, she now found herself kind of wanting to stay in Skyhold, just a little bit longer.

Of course, it only took one of Vivienne’s hideous etiquette lessons to make her immediately glad that she’d soon flee the castle. Why _hadn’t_ Solas’ spirit friend been in Tevinter, exactly?

“This is the real reason you’re sneaking off to the Plains, isn’t it? Cullen muttered under his breath at her as the members of the Halamshiral party all filed into the large hall Madame de Fer had commandeered for dance practice. "...Is it too late for me to come?”

Yes, because, alongside her four hours of etiquette training a week, ‘dance practice’ had now become a thing. Sera was notably absent. Asha was surprised that Bull had turned up, but the mercenary had shrugged, saying, “ _Benn-Hassreth_ , boss”, as if it had nothing to do with the fact that Dorian of the Illustrious House Pavus was the men’s tutor. Solas was also there, though the tension in every line of his body told her he was impatient for their departure to the Dales the next morning. Cassandra looked like she already wanted to punch something. 

“Who has time for dancing at this ball anyway?” Asha hissed back at the Commander. “Aren’t we supposed to be busy saving someone’s life?”

“There’s a chance that any of us may be asked to dance over the course of four days, I suppose,” he replied, which she thought was a ridiculous thing for him to say. As if people wouldn’t be queuing up around the ballroom for him. “No way of knowing which dance that’ll be, so we just have to learn them all.”

“Here’s a radical thought - we could just say no! ‘Apologies, Madame Frothyskirts, but do you not see that demon mauling the Jewel of the Empire? I shall have to decline this particular quadrille’.”

“‘Frothyskirts’?” that unimpressed echo came from Ellana, who Asha had almost forgotten was on her other side.

“Sera might not be here in person,” Asha said with a shrug. “But I like to think I’m representing her in spirit.”

“As if any girl in a tight-enough corset wouldn’t immediately have you begging out of the palm of her hand,” Ellana retorted flippantly, before marching into the room and leaving Asha sputtering denials with the elegance of a beached fish. Cullen covered a chuckle behind his hand.

“How very droll,” remarked the First Enchanter, in a voice that suggested she thought it was anything but. “Positions, please, my dears.”

Asha waggled her eyebrows at the Commander, feeling like a naughty schoolchild caught passing notes, before they hurriedly arranged themselves to fall in with the two orderly lines already forming in the chamber. Vivienne positioned herself in front of the women, Dorian in front of the men opposite. After a few moments of hushed chatter, the First Enchanter called the room to order and they started practicing the first dance in its deconstructed form, the two groups a detached mirror of each other as they learnt the steps eight beats at a time, in an entirely silent room devoid of music. 

Well, some of them learnt, or made attempts to. When Asha caught Bull’s eye after he _finally_ managed to tear his gaze away from ogling Dorian’s ass, the Qunari grinned and gave her a thoroughly unapologetic wink as his motives were discovered. Asha gave him a shrug, to signal that she didn’t blame him in the least.

Learning the steps wasn’t too arduous. Unlike understanding the political ramifications of spoon choices, or doing the same bow seventy times over, she actually _enjoyed_ dancing. And apparently Cass approached a ballroom the same way she would a battlefield, which diverted Vivienne’s attentions away from her usual hobby of cataloguing Asha’s faults. 

“ _I still say Dalish dancing is better_ ,” she muttered to Ellana, as they span on the spot.

Ellana made a very suggestive face. “ _That’s just because you want to press your body all up against-_ ”

“- _A pretty woman in a corset, yes, I know - and really, doesn’t everyone, at some point in their life?_ ,” Asha finished hastily for her, because any name out of her sister’s mouth would’ve been completely translatable. Across the room, Solas, the only other speaker of elvhen, raised a single eyebrow at her, and she pretended not to notice, her gaze suddenly riveted on Vivienne’s feet.

“Well, I suppose it’s time to partner up,” Madame de Fer announced with an demonstrable lack of confidence about twenty minutes later. Asha glanced around - with both Sera and Leliana absent from their already smaller number, there were far more men than women in this room: just five in total.

“I’ll sit this one out, your worship,” came Varric’s voice from the far side of the room. “None of those uptight assholes in Orlais are going to dance with me anyway. I just showed up cause I would’ve paid to see the Seeker learn to dance. It’s very entertaining - you could sell tickets.”

“I suppose you think you’re being _funny_ , dwarf,” sputtered Cass, her face turning blotchy with indignation. Asha cast Cullen a significant look across the room, hoping he was adding this evidence to their blossoming courtship conspiracy theory.

The Commander had taken a single step forward, when Vivienne said to Varric, “I suppose you’re right, my dear, which is a damned shame, because your form was _wonderful_. But it rather evens out our numbers: Lady Montilyet, would you please help Warden Blackwall? Ellana, you seem to know what you’re doing, so you can partner Bull. And Dorian, dear, perhaps you can impart some… delicacy, to our Seeker…”

Vivienne rapidly began rattling off pairs, and by the end of it Asha was stood in front of Solas, with Ellana and Bull on one side, and Cullen and Vivienne on the other. Asha fought back a laugh - the Commander’s expression told her he would rather be anywhere else.

Solas bowed slightly, and fuck him but it was the correct bow, made to a representative of the Andrastian faith. He looked for all the world like he’d spent his entire life in court, as he then gracefully extended out a hand to Asha, relishing her scrutiny. “Ok,” she said, “so which spirit taught you this, you bastard? Drakon himself?”

He quirked a smile that… well, looked both a little smug and a little sinful. _Desire demon, then_ , Asha thought, as he responded, “Maybe I’m just a fast learner, _lethallan_.”

“Bullshit. You’re cheating.”

“Would you consider it cheating? It is well within your power to receive private tutoring, as well,” he replied, that same smile making that sound almost like a proposition. And given the last time she’d lucid dreamed in the Fade...

Asha narrowed her eyes, and took his hand, “maybe I don’t need it.”

Further down the line, Blackwall had taken Lady Montilyet’s hand, and Asha heard him mutter gruffly, “Apologies in advance, my Lady. When it comes to the dancefloor, there’s not much difference between me and a bear.” 

The music started up. Asha winked at Cullen as he, with a face that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a person ascending the gallows, reached out to Madame de Fer. He had just enough time to roll his eyes at her before the dance began.

“ _Do you think our Lady of Iron might be playing matchmaker?_ ” Solas asked her casually in elvhen, drawing her attention back to him, as he clasped her anchored hand in his and she stepped in a careful circle around him.

“ _Really, Solas, that would imply there was something about our friendship worth speculating over,_ ” she replied, coming back to her original place and turning her body sideways to start the… what had Vivienne called it? - the promenade. The fancy walking _shemlen_ tried to pretend was dancing. 

Her voice was friendly, but the intent in her words was clear: _you agreed to stop flirting with me._ Something in his expression told her he might have got the message, but it didn’t really help matters when he then quickly leaned in to put his hand on the small of her back for the next turn. It was a mortifying echo of when he’d kissed her, an event that was now months in the past. They transitioned through the next few steps in silence.

“ _So she was just separating out the elfy elves, then,_ ” he said suddenly, as if to lighten the mood. She snorted. 'Elfy elves' was a bit of a tongue-twister, in their language.

“I do hope you won’t make that sound, or talk in that tongue, at the Winter Palace, dear,” Vivienne remarked.

“Only when the humans stop speaking Orlesian,” Asha replied with sugary sweetness, casting a brief glance over her shoulder. 

“Only _one_ of those languages is considered sedition when uttered on palace grounds.” 

“We shall be perfectly well-behaved on the night, Lady Vivienne,” Solas responded flatly. “No knife-ear uprisings will plague Halamshiral this year.”

“Oh, what a shame, and I was _so_ hoping there’d be time in my schedule to bathe in the blood of my oppressors,” Asha said in a falsely woeful tone. Solas gave her a sharp look that she didn’t understand, and she wondered if he was judging the Dalish again. In truth, templar massacres aside, the fact that Lavellan had wandered in a thoroughly reclusive territory meant that she’d not had to face much _shemlen_ aggression in her own lifetime. 

“Term it a beauty treatment, and half _la beau monde_ may endorse and follow suit,” he quipped.

“Gosh, Solas, you read my mind! You know me,” Asha replied with an lazy grin, “I care so very much about Orlais’ opinion of me.”

“One would almost think your lives depended on it,” came another terse interjection from Vivienne, her face thunderous behind its brittle veneer. At her reprimand, Solas and Asha shared an unrepentant look. It seemed that, although neither of them stepped a foot wrong in their dance together, they were both far from model pupils.

Further down the line, Bull stepped on Ellana’s foot. He grunted out a curse that made El giggle, and Dorian tutt. Everything seemed to be fine - at least, until Vivienne explained this was one of fifty-four dances they’d be required to learn, before the Umbralis ball.

As Asha prepared to leave at the lesson’s close, she suddenly heard a soft footstep from the other side of the room, one that she immediately recognised. She turned back, signalling to Ellana that she’d meet her at dinner, and walked back to the far corner of the chamber to find Cole sitting on an old disused desk, having displaced all the dust around it. He’d been watching the lesson’s progress, and erased the awareness of his presence from all of their minds.

“Hey,” she chided the spirit, “I didn’t know you were here! You should’ve asked me to dance - you’re going to be at Halamshiral, too, you know.” _If only so we have a barometer for my emotional state readily reporting in to the Nightingale._

“That’s why I came,” Cole told her, “the invitation said everyone who is going to the palace needed to attend. But dancing seems hard. You have to listen with your feet as well as your heart.”

“Not really when the Dalish do it, but I suppose you’re right.”

“‘Graceful lines, all graceful lines, every angle sweet and soft. And bright smiles, the sound of her laughter sweeter than the music. Heart in my throat, mind in my feet, every indignity is worth suffering for, if you please just glance my way…’”

“Goodness.” Asha said, blushing, “please don’t tell me who that was about.” She briefly wondered whether it was Solas, but that couldn’t be true, because regardless of whatever he felt for her (probably nothing), he’d danced perfectly well and it certainly couldn’t be considered an ‘indignity’. Blackwall and Josephine, maybe? Josephine was definitely graceful and sweet. By Mythal, maybe Bull just liked Dorian even more than she thought… 

She paused for a second, considering her options.

“...unless it was Varric thinking about Cass. Then I absolutely need to know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone disappointed with the dancing content in this particular chapter, I can promise there will be more dancing chapters to come! xoxox


	59. Chapter Fifty-Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All New, Faded for Her.

“Solas, stop! Stop! _Please!_ ” Asha cried.

She’d never seen his face like that, so tense with fury that it seemed almost like an ancient statue of a wrathful god, carved out of unfeeling marble. She wondered if she looked anywhere near as terrifying, when her own fury gripped her.

She reached out, and put a hand on his arm as he stalked towards the mages of the Kirkwall Circle. He froze at the weight of her touch, as her fingers clamped down. When he looked down at her face, for a second his gaze was unfathomably cold. Like he didn’t recognise her, or couldn’t tell the difference between her and the people he wanted to hurt.

“I’m so, so sorry for your friend,” she murmured, hoping her tone was placating enough to calm him down, and also reassure the mages who were cowering behind her. “But they didn’t know. The Circles wouldn’t dare teach them anything like this.”

“The Circles are _gone_ ,” he growled, “they… could… _learn_.”

“Yes. Well, then. Killing the first people who’ve been told... might be counterproductive,” she tried to reason. She stepped in closer, placing herself between him and the mages. “ _Solas_.”

He glared down at her, almost as if he couldn’t believe she dared stand in his way - and she supposed it could be considered hypocrisy, given how she’d reacted when he stood between her and Alexius. But as she held his gaze, some of the chill detachment left his face. It gradually softened and then, suddenly, all the tension melted from his body in a single, defeated slump. “Never again,” he muttered.

Asha let out a heavy sigh of relief, then glanced over her shoulder at the Kirkwall mages. “You might want to get out of here,” she said tersely, “ _now_.”

“I - thank you, my lady -”

“And I’ve found that, when I’m attacked by bandits?” she interrupted, glaring at the leader as he tried to stammer his gratitude, “an ice mine serves me _perfectly well_.”

“Yes, my lady.” The mages scrambled away, picking up their staffs in haste. She only let go of Solas’ arm once they were entirely out of sight.

“Cole?” Asha asked, glancing over to the spirit who’d watched the entire exchange with a sorrowful expression. “Do you mind making sure our friends get far, far away? Don’t show yourself to them,” _that would put him in danger_ , “but maybe make it so they at least make it out of the warzone in one piece.”

The spirit glanced at Solas, no doubt gleaning the true intention behind her request. He nodded, and then was gone in a flash. While having Cole as company helped her when she struggled, Asha wasn’t sure Solas wanted an intrusive audience to whatever grief he was feeling. That left Cassandra, who’d watched the entire exchange - in particular the bit where Asha broke a pride demon’s chains - from the sidelines, clearly uncomfortable. “I’ll... go see if Harding needs any heavy lifting done,” she said, carefully, before turning in the direction of the Inquisition camp. As she walked away they heard her mutter, “ _that’s_ something I’m qualified for.”

Once they were alone, Asha turned back to Solas. He was staring at the ground where the shadowed, wispy form of Wisdom had disintegrated and floated away on the breeze. When she came to stand next to him, he glanced at her only briefly before his gaze returned to the same spot. 

“I hope-” Asha started, and failed to continue. Whatever platitude that followed would be inadequate. “Wisdom’s passing… it seemed peaceful.”

“Yes.” he said quietly. “...Far more than it might have been, had we not come to its aid.”

“I don’t want to sound stupid, but was it an elvish spirit?” she asked, “we’re in the Dales, and it spoke elvhen…”

“No. That is simply the language it knows me by. It is the language in which we spoke with each other.”

“I see,” Asha said, a little sorrowfully, “...I was going to offer to say the Prayers of the Dead. I know there’s no body, but I am a First and can complete the rites-”

“Those words would mean nothing, and do no good here,” he cut her off, his tone suddenly holding a sharp edge.

“I - oh. Ok.” Asha couldn’t think of anything more to say to that. She was a little hurt by his dismissal, but the normal hackles that rose whenever he dismissed the Dalish as ineffectual and childish didn't affect her, now. Wisdom was Solas’ friend - she couldn't tell him how to mourn them, and she supposed what he had said as the spirit passed came close enough to a prayer.

She stood still, for a few more breaths, watching him and feeling like an intruder, as his hands clenched and unclenched limply at his sides.

"I can... go too? If you need some time alone.”

For a second there was silence. “

No,” Solas said quietly. He still sounded almost angry with his own answer, but she realised it must be pain and grief that made his words so short and clipped. “Stay. Please.”

Asha bit her lip, uncertain of what to do with herself. A Dalish funeral wouldn’t please him, but that was the only way she knew to mourn the dead. She felt like a useless spare part, and more than anything… he just looked so _lonely_. But then he didn’t want to be _alone_ , so, maybe…

She put her hand out again and touched his arm. As before, he tensed up like it was an intrusion, but didn't react beyond that. When he glanced at her, she said, “do you - I’m sorry, but I don’t really know what you need-”

Solas held her gaze for a second, seeing the question in her eyes, and then nodded, taking a small step towards her. She took one too, and then brought her arms up and around him. She hugged him in an embrace that stayed gentle. She stroked a soothing line down his back as he held onto her waist and placed his forehead on her shoulder. After a moment she heard his deep sigh, and then felt his chest shudder, in the motion of a sob, though there was no sound. He leaned into her, giving her all his weight.

“Spirits are born from feeling, and the Fade holds echoes, right?” she said, tentatively, after what felt like a few minutes. Her words felt like groping in the dark, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that, after everything he’d told her and what she knew about Valour, they might hold true. “Do you think… if there’s enough of your memory, and maybe others…?”

Solas pulled back a little. “I - Yes. Potentially. The energy held in spirits is not lost to the Fade, like mortals - it simply returns there, to where it finds its home.”

“So Wisdom might come back, right?” Asha said, “that’s - I don’t mean to belittle the loss - it probably takes time, and maybe it won’t be the same…”

“No. It won’t be. Spirits are formed of ideals and then shaped by experience, not the other way around. Whatever spirit reforms, if one does, it will not likely remember me. But... your words hold truth. Something new may reform and live on, which is more than many people can say for those they’ve lost. It is no doubt selfish of me to wish for more.”

“That’s… fuck. I was really trying my best to be comforting,” she sighed. 

He let out a short, pained chuckle of laughter that surprised the both of them, and in that surprise they both became aware of how close they still were, his arms on her waist, hers resting lightly on his shoulders. Their gaze caught, held… and _yeah,_ Asha thought, _this is a kissing moment_. 

But they weren’t lovers, and she found that… she didn’t really want to kiss him. Yes, she knew from memory that it would be a pretty enjoyable experience, but it was one that she didn’t want to embark on without some true feeling behind it. 

Plus, they were also standing over the ground where his friend had just died. Not _massively_ tasteful. So she hastily disentangled herself from the hug and took a step backward, trying not to notice the way his expression shuttered slightly, as if she was the one who’d rejected him, not the other way around.

“Thank you for not killing those people,” she said, to try and move the conversation swiftly on. “Trust me, I know it’s hard.”

It was only after she said it that she realised what a stupid topic it was to pick, stoking up recent pain and fresh anger. But Solas merely watched her, his face once more back to that infuriating, impassive mask. After a moment he said, “you’re the last person I expected to stand in my way.”

“Because I’m so furious and bloodthirsty?”

“Because I thought it would anger you, as well. You yourself have been tortured, and changed into something you’re not.”

Asha opened her mouth for a second, then closed it. If it had been said in any other kind of context, she would have felt almost affronted to hear her experience reduced in someone else’s words, accurate yet somehow twisted. Instead, she gently chided. “The two situations are not the same.”

“Oh?”

“There’s no way these mages could’ve known about Wisdom. I only freed the demon because I'm your friend and trusted your words on the matter.” she said, then sighed tiredly. “I know you want people to be more like you, but for centuries mages have been told they can’t explore the Fade without demons chewing down on their psyche. They’ve had no way to learn about spirits. And these guys would've have had even less of an opportunity. From what I gather, the Circles culled anyone who tried to learn these kinds of things.”

“They should never have summoned Wisdom in the first place.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you. I would never condone blood magic. But it was their mistake, not their intention.”

“And so... their foolishness is worth Wisdom dying? If it helps them learn a lesson?”

“Of course not! That’s not what I’m saying! But killing them wouldn’t serve any purpose. More people would just live on in ignorance. You can hate them for what they’ve done to your friend, but they understand better now. They won’t do it again.”

“There are always those who ensnare spirits for personal gain. We would have no demons, otherwise. For all your freedom, your clans taught you nothing,” Solas turned away, and then muttered, almost to himself, “...it is cruel for me to expect you to understand.”

“Hey!” he seemed to not be directing those words at her, but it was still a gods-damned insult. “The Dalish _respect_ spirits!”

“As best they can.”

“We’re trying! _I_ try. There’s a difference between not having all the facts, and never even looking for them.”

Solas’ rising anger extinguished again, the tension sapping from his body. “My apologies, _lethallan_. I did not mean to insult you."

"It's ok. I know you're upset."

There were a couple more moments of silence, as Asha thanked the Creators for every footstep those Kirkwall mages gained on the both of them, should Solas suddenly snap and change his mind regarding their right to live. She was so content to widen the distance, that she startled when he spoke again.

"In many ways, you’re like me.” he examined her carefully. “You've seen ignorance snatch away all that you love.”

Asha frowned, fighting the urge to immediately challenge the statement. She knew grief could be a selfish, hungry beast, that often looked for enablers. To give itself more to feast on. 

“I didn’t suffer from _ignorance_ , Solas. What those templars did to me was deliberate and knowing,” she replied, feeling like that was the only way to describe the Rite of Tranquility. No one did that to a person and thought that it was genuinely the best thing for their wellbeing - as Cullen said, that was just a convenient excuse designed to absolve guilt. 

“But ignorance has fuelled that perception of necessity. It is another symptom, of the wider disease.”

Ok, now she was getting pissed, which wouldn’t serve either of them any good. “I’m telling you, these two things are not the same. Ignorant people can change with time, if you give them the chance. It’s hateful and wilful cruelty that is unforgivable and irredeemable.” she let out a huff of breath, “look, I just wanted to say thank you, for listening to me, and letting them go. You made the right decision. I'm sorry that it feels shitty in this situation."

“Would that I had your certainty.”

“Bold of you to assume I’m ever certain.” She sometimes longed for the days when she could hate every templar on principle, and not worry over their health, or lyrium-related wellbeing. “But, take it from someone who still feels pretty vengeful most the fucking time - it’s all about _picking_ your battles. Why do you think I let Alexius live, in the end? I can probably trade the goodwill and the help he’s given Fiona to get away with killing like, fifteen templars. Going on a murderous rampage is very much for a special occasion, Solas. These people weren’t worth you dirtying your hands.”

He opened his mouth, and hesitated, looking like he wanted to say something. In the end, he settled for a rueful smile “...Wise words, from Keeper Ashatarasylnin Lavellan.” 

There was an awkward silence that neither of them seemed to know how to fill.

“Well, birthplace of Wisdom!” Asha said, raising her voice and turning to address the place where the spirit had sat before, “mark this moment, when Ashatarsylnin Lavellan gave Solas council, rather than the other way around!” She turned back to Solas and grinned, hoping she wasn’t being too irreverent, “it’s so very, very rare for me to be wiser than you. I bet that whatever grows back here will be pretty damn strong.”

He smiled a tired, drawn smile - showing that, while she probably sounded all kinds of ignorant herself, he at least appreciated the sentiment. 

“So, um… what do we do now?” she said, awkwardly, once they’d moved away from the space Wisdom had left, and just looked out across the water. “I guess we could speak to Ellana’s clan and help them? Or go straight back to Skyhold and-”

“I won’t be coming.”

Asha blinked, “I’m sorry?”

He wasn't looking at her as he said, “I… need some time alone.”

_That’s the last thing you need, you idiot,_ Asha thought, having to beat back her mounting frustration. It struck her now, as it had when he’d danced circles around her but never acted on any of his flirtations, that Solas was one of those people who only seemed as lonely as he did because he deliberately pushed everyone away.

But you couldn't say that, to someone who's friend had just died. Not really. Or at least... not with him.

“I understand,” she said. Though she really, really didn’t. She was Dalish - the only way you pushed through pain was with those you loved. 

In saying that, she thought she could pinpoint the moment where the gulf between them widened. Solas nodded, but said nothing. She was looking at his back as she spoke. He didn't turn around. Asha thought she could’ve walked away in that moment, and he wouldn’t have noticed her go. 

He suddenly felt far away, and she felt a wave of dread come over her with the force of a premonition. “Will you… come back?”

Thankfully, her question worked to ground him back into the present. He turned slightly, so that he could looked at her sidelong. He stared for an uncomfortably long time, as he had at the site of Wisdom’s passing, like he was coming to some kind of decision. It made her feel… like the question might somewhat hinge on her. He still spoke with very few people in Skyhold.

Finally, he nodded. “...Yes. I’ll meet you at Skyhold.”

The relief was palpable, and it was only when it hit that she realised how much she'd been terrified he was about to say no. Asha genuinely had no idea if she could do any of this without him there to help her. Despite everything else that had happened, he was still her closest friend. She looked awkwardly looked around, wondering if she should hug him again. Part of her wondered if she should just pick him and drag him directly back to Skyhold, to mope while he painted. 

But he'd answered her question, and the more he looked at her, the more she got the sense he was waiting for her to go.

“Stay safe, Solas,” Asha said, knowing the words to be entirely inadequate. “ _Dareth shiral_.”

The journey back was awkward and often silent. Cole and Cassandra were not the most instinctual of pairings, and without Solas’ presence there it was worse. Cole kept asking the Seeker probing questions about Caer Oswin, and Seeker Lucius, going into an unnerving amount of detail that made the Seeker angry and sullenly uncomfortable in turns.

As such, Asha was relieved when Skyhold came into view. It was one of the few rainy days that she’d seen this high up in the mountains, the sky corpse grey, with thick fog. The rain was chill and unpleasant, coating her clothes until they clung wetly to her like an icy second skin. She’d sent word ahead of their arrival, but in this kind of rain she didn’t really expect anyone to come out and meet them. 

Which was why, when they finished making their way down the long, winding mountain pass and ascended the drawbridge, it was a pleasant surprise to see two figures waiting by the portcullis at the other end. One was short with a cap of curls, the other tall and armour clad. 

When Asha and Buttons set foot on the drawbridge, Ellana shook Cullen’s arm, pointed, and started waving manically at her approaching sister.

“You shouldn’t have come out!” Asha shouted across the bridge. “It’s fucking freezing!”

Ellana was still too busy waving to show whether she heard the reprimand or not. Cullen raised a single hand in greeting. Smiling, Asha raised her anchored hand and waved back, trusting its light to cut through the fog like a beacon as Buttons trudged forward.

Then, she saw Cullen lean down to Ellana, as if speaking in her ear. She heard his voice. The words he said were indistinguishable at this distance, but she recognised his rumbling tone of dry humour, and whatever he said was followed by a rising trill of Ellana’s laughter. 

And something spasmed in her chest, near painful. It was so sudden and surprising that she stopped waving and dropped her hand to clutch at it, grabbing a fistful of her shirt in her fingers.

Oh gods.

_Cullen liked Ellana._

Why else would he wait out in the rain to meet their party? It offered him the perfect excuse to spend some time with her sister, alone.

But... of course he liked Ellana. Everyone liked Ellana. She was kind and funny and pretty, and today she was wearing a butter yellow dress, bright despite the grim, depressing weather. She was clever, and more sensible, these days - even though she'd already been the more sensible one out of the two of them, regardless. Her smile was wide and sunny. And - although Asha didn’t really like knowing this about her little sister - El could turn on the most smouldering bedroom eyes at will, the bane of suitors and sales vendors alike since she'd discovered the ability at around seventeen. Unlike Asha, who stuttered and blotched when she tried to flirt, Ellana simply smiled beautifically until everyone around her was in that same state. Asha had yet to see a person it hadn’t worked on.

She remembered what Cole had let slip in the dance practice. Had that - had that been _Cullen_? Thinking about her _sister_?

And why did she - why did it _matter_?

She didn’t get a chance to answer that question, because Buttons pulled alongside the two of them, and she had to dismount. 

She slid down off Buttons’ back. Ellana enveloped her in a hug, then almost immediately dropped her and hastily backed up. “Bleugh,” she said, “you’re all wet and gross.”

“Are you even truly Dalish, _da’lath’in_?” Asha grinned, and then ducked in again for another damp, cold hug that made Ellana squeal in disgust as she tried to bat her off and make her let go.

“Stop it! You monster!” Ellana shrieked, as Asha chuckled. Cullen watched the two of them with his small, secret type of grin, and suddenly Asha felt self-conscious about the display, in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It wasn’t that he was intruding on a private moment, but the fact that he was watching… and with that knowledge she began to think about how much she looked like a drowned rat, with her bedraggled hair in sopping chunks. Stood directly next to Ellana’s pristine appearance, she no doubt made her sister look all the more beautiful.

But again - that was fine. Being presentable had never bothered her before. She nearly always ran to war room meetings fresh out of whatever last minute-bath she’d had to take...

“Inquisitor,” he said with a nod, when he caught her looking at him and her laughter died out.

“Commander,” she replied. She was pleased her voice sounded normal. Though why wouldn’t it be normal? Nothing was wrong. “I’d hug you, but apparently I’m gross.”

Cullen looked quite startled at the prospect, “you’d… hug me?”

Asha wondered, for a second, if they were not quite on hugging terms. Her chest clenched again, so she made her voice sarcastic and passed it off as a joke. “If I wasn’t soaked through, I’d certainly _consider_ it...”

“Well, welcome back, regardless,” he said, while Buttons shifted from foot to foot and Cassandra and Cole pulled up behind them. “You’ll be _delighted_ to know you’ve arrived just in time for our first round of Winter Palace dress fittings.”

“Ecstatic,” she deadpanned. “And it’s not even my name day.” He grinned.

“Where’s droopy-ears?” Ellana asked, glancing over her shoulder. Asha could not believe that the nickname Sera had grown out of had actually managed to live on through her sister.

“‘Wisdom knows enduring is pain. He hurts for her, another of many he couldn't save. He carries necessary deaths,’” Cole intoned solemnly, from where he perched on his docile pony.

“He… caught wind of upcoming Orlesian dress fittings, apparently,” Asha said, with an awkward cough, in the silence that followed _that_ proclamation. “He’s going to be mysteriously absent for a while.”

Asha was grateful when Buttons snorted, indicating that she didn’t really appreciate being left out in the rain when there was a perfectly nice warm stable nearby. They started their walk through the courtyard. “I’m sorry to hear that the trip did not achieve the desired outcome,” Cullen said, which Asha thought might be the most Cullen way of saying ‘sorry someone died, even if it was a spirit’, ever. “From our reports, I got the impression things were stabilising in the region.”

“Things are definitely better for Hawen’s clan,” Asha said, and began filling them in on the state of the Plains. Both he and Ellana stayed with her, listening to her rundown, until she had handed off Buttons to a stablehand with a handful of oats and a soft kiss to the muzzle. “So,” she said, turning, “what have I missed here?”

“Well, Leliana’s reports indicate that there has been red templar movement across the Storm Coast-”

“Dorian got really drunk and kissed Bull in the middle of The Herald’s Rest! In full view of everyone!” Ellana interrupted with a squeal, “he said something badass, like ‘fuck lineage’. Only it was _really_ slurred, and then he just clambered on top of Bull's lap and went in, like, tongue-first! I mean, I know they were terrible at the whole ‘secret trysts’ thing, and we all knew they were sleeping together, but it was really quite romantic…”

“Goodness. Now we all know who the protagonists of Varric’s next serial will be.” Asha said.

“Yes. I believe some of my… fans, as you term them, have - um - rather shifted camps,” Cullen observed blandly, which startled a laugh out of her, but also a giggle from Ellana that made him smile in turn.

That spasm happened in her chest again.

“Well, then, Cullen,” her sister said, voice equal parts practical and _knowing_ , “you’ll just also need to kiss someone in a grandiose, passionate gesture, to get them all back on side. You know, pick someone important and _really_ make it count.”

Asha had been about to make the same joke - only slightly edited, and not as seductive. She would’ve probably suggested Rylen as a potential candidate, given the size of his own fan club. And ‘passionate’ wouldn’t have been in there. 

But Ellana put it there, because if there was one thing Ellana knew, it was how to flirt with the people who fancied her. Cullen stuttered and went bright red. Nothing out of the ordinary there - it was an hourly occurrence, quite frankly - but for some reason this one made Asha feel almost… annoyed.

_She’d_ wanted to make that joke.

But... why wouldn’t Ellana flirt with him? She was allowed to, and he was exactly her type - that was, beautiful, kind, and honourably dutiful, like some knight out of a storybook. As Varric was fond of pointing out, he even had that whole brooding edge, to really flesh out the heroic persona. Orlesian bards would easily be able to write him questing all on his lonesome into the sunset, the name of an unrequited love on his lips. 

And, well. Ellana had seen him shirtless. Asha had a feeling that was an argument in and of itself.

“Also, Sera showed me how to make a bomb!” Ellana continued, in a tone of voice that shook Asha out of her daze to glance worriedly at Cullen over her sister’s head, while he shrugged helplessly in response.

“I thought you were interested in jars of bees?” she said, weakly.

“Oh, well, that was _weeks_ ago! I've had so many lessons since then. And, well, it’s not quite a bomb, but like a flask that you chuck at people, full of something that explodes. And burns them. So you’re not so special now, Miss Fireball. I’m able to fuck up my enemies too, now.”

_Ellana isn’t a mage._

Asha didn’t know why this thought hit her like an arrow through the forehead. She obviously _knew_ this about Ellana. But it was suddenly a fact she felt with painful clarity. 

“Well, when you can conjure it in under three seconds, do let me know, and I shall start to worry I’ve got competition,” she said, her boast feeling like it came from very far away in her own ears. 

She hoped it sounded normal to everyone else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hehehe 😈😈😈
> 
> Sorry this week's chapters are a little more sedately paced, I think y'all are really going to like next week's!! I'll see you then xx


	60. Chapter Sixty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fittings for Halamshiral.

The first time Asha beat Commander Helaine in battle, she nearly cried.

Defeating Cassandra was a relatively frequent occurrence these days, if only because she was familiar with the Seeker’s strengths and weaknesses. Defeating Cullen had been a beautiful moment, one that she could have treasured, had it not entailed actual bodily harm. 

But Commander Helaine was Asha’s nigh undefeatable opponent. Mostly just because… she never got tired. 

Asha had no idea if this was something intrinsic to Commander Helaine’s nature as a formidable, intimidating person. Or just a product of the fact that she had a very light magic sword that corrected her posture and trimmed her movements and parries to brutal, perfect efficiency, and had done for years. These days, Asha and Valour also moved as one. Sometimes, the spirit blade would move her body so quickly that her own mind struggled to catch up with the positions it tore her through. Her muscles would take a few seconds to even realise they should be protesting. Sometimes it felt like Valour was the one fighting, and Asha was just along for the ride.

Which was what made it even more confusing when Helaine met her blow for blow, every single time.

A harsh parry sent Asha pinwheeling backwards, sweat dripping from the tendrils of hair that fell around her face. Valour repaid in kind, angling her hand forward at the last second to stop Helaine landing a blow that would’ve ended the spar. She arched her blade up into the air and pushed the woman off of her. The two of them parted. Asha’s chest was heaving, but - and this was something that only happened occasionally - so was Helaine’s. Her hair was perfectly in place and she wasn’t a feral mess like Asha, but her colour was high and she wasn’t precisely unruffled. She was... tousled. Even.

 _I will take tousled._ Asha thought.

“Woo! Go Ash!” came a cheer from the sidelines. She briefly glanced over to see Ellana in Inquisition leathers, taking a break from her own training with Sera to watch the bout. And next to her, in a flash of red and gold, was…

…Cullen. 

_...Again?_ Asha fought the urge to scowl.

There was movement at her periphery… which _shouldn’t have been her periphery._ She shouldn’t have been looking away. Helaine took advantage of her foolish, momentary distraction, to charge at her. The clear resonance of Valour rang through the air as Asha’s sword swung in a wide, blazing arc and met her opponent with a discordant crash. She returned her focus to the fight and moulded her barrier to punch outwards at Helaine, displacing the knight’s own barrier and knocking the woman off balance as she rained down another series of blows. As every single one was blocked, Asha let out an angry, frustrated snarl. This was supposed to be what she was good at. Why wasn’t she good at it? _Especially_ whenever she had an audience.

Unthinkingly, she lashed out with her left foot.

It made contact with Helaine’s knee. Her tutor hadn’t been expecting it. There was an unpleasant crunch, as she sent the woman sprawling in the dirt. Helaine let out a grunt of pain, and a single lock of dark hair fell in front of her face.

Asha should’ve felt triumphant, but all she felt was… gods, she was angry. 

She had no idea why.

Helaine rolled in the dirt, trying to use the momentum to stand. But Asha was already moving, advancing forward with one hand outstretched. She narrowed her eyes, her hand pulsed, and a disruption field mushroomed out from her, making the world take on a syrupy quality. Helaine was just trying to rebalance, but the stasis deflated her momentum as time and the air grew heavy, leaving her teetering unsteadily with weight only through one leg.

Asha should've gone for that leg. Instead, she punched her in the face.

Helaine was moving too slowly to dodge. There was a moment of confusion, and actual affront blossomed on her face, as she almost incredulously watched the fist make contact. The woman stumbled, as in slow motion blood began to fountain from her nose.

In Asha's other hand, Valour pulsed brighter. 

Asha savagely swept Helaine’s feet from under her, and her mentor dropped.

Valour pulsed brighter again, now blazing white. Asha brought it down on the prone Helaine. 

Helaine managed to block the blade. Obviously. That was what she was good at. But then Asha kicked her again, this time aiming at her wrist, and the hilt went spinning from her grasp. First slow, moving through the disruption field, falling just outside its radius as it lost momentum. Asha scowled, redirecting her attention, and the force of her barrier sent it clattering to the other side of the ring.

She pressed her boot down - not gently - on Helaine’s shoulder, preventing the other woman from getting up, and leaving a dusty boot print emblazoned across her pristine robes.

“Yield!” Asha demanded, and held the blade over Helaine’s heart as the disruption field faded from her. She sounded crabby to her own ears.

Then, it began to sink in. Months of training, where success was only marked by the increasing amount of time she was able to hold her own against the Knight Enchanter. Thirty seconds of near blind, sourceless fury, and the woman was flat on her back in the dirt. This wasn’t even the first time she’d tried physical attacks against her. But it was certainly the first time she’d used them like she was a two-bit thug in a bar brawl. The other mage’s lip was split, and she had dirt embedded in her cheek.

 _Not very honourable_ , Asha thought. She wouldn’t make much of a knight.

“...I yield,” Commander Helaine said. Asha immediately backed off, wincing as she _literally removed her boot_ from the woman’s front. Helaine sat up, and there was a thrum of pale light she immediately healed her injuries, and blood stopped dripping from her nose. Asha held out a hand, as Helaine had done every time she’d defeated her, and the other woman took it. Asha knew she probably looked a little shamefaced as she tugged her to standing. 

“I suppose that is one way to find purpose,” the enchanter said archly, though she didn’t exactly sound displeased. “We must now simply work on... refining it, Inquisitor.”

“...Yeah, sure. Sounds good.” Asha said, hoping she didn’t sound as much at a loss as she felt. She had no idea where that sudden burst of feral rage had come from. 

“Let us take five.”

There was spattering of applause from the sidelines, as El gave a dutiful, sisterly ovation. 

Cullen was still standing next to her, with a small, pleased smile. 

Immediately, all of Asha’s triumph at beating the woman who had plagued her for months withered up in her chest.

 _Oh, fucking why??_ She thought, eloquently, feeling betrayed by her own brain. Why couldn’t she just feel smug that she’d defeated an exemplary warrior? What was _wrong_ with her? She had no idea why seeing Cullen at her sister’s side pissed her off so much.

It had only happened twice this week since returning, but twice was enough to acquaint her with the ugly, unwelcome feeling that currently resided in her chest. Cullen had held a door open for the two of them upon leaving the dining hall the evening before, letting her sister through first with a deferential gesture and a tentative sidelong glance. The entire thing had made Asha’s skin crawl, for some unfathomable reason. 

She was protective of her sister, yes. More so, probably, since the massacre. But she’d never extended that protective instinct in any way to her sister’s love life. Ellana was frankly _better_ at these things than she was, and could take care of herself. If El was interested in the Commander, she would act, and if she wasn’t, then she had plenty of efficient countermeasures she knew to draw on. She could handle it. So why did the idea of her and Cullen being in close proximity leave Asha feeling so prickly?

Whereas before she might have used the break to chat to her sister, she instead simply gave the two of them a terse nod then walked in the opposite direction, towards the water trough for a drink. They probably wanted some time more alone... just the two of them.

...Was it because Cullen was a templar? She had to admit she didn't really like the idea of Ellana with a templar. Though Ellana’s frequent attendance at the military training ground - with the crowds of shirtlessness spectators - suggested her sister had no such qualms.

 _And you decided he’s not really a templar anymore._ She could hardly go back on her promise to honour Cullen’s redemption by saying he wasn’t good enough for her sister. _'Sorry Cullen, I don’t hate your guts, but I also don’t think you deserve to be in any way part of my family, and actually could you maintain that old five meters distance at all time thing, just for good measure? No hard feelings!’_

That would be a horrible thing to do. He was _more_ than good enough for her sister.

And Ellana was exactly the kind of person capable of getting Cullen to lighten his mood for a bit. It would be _good_ for them.

She beat Helaine three more times that day. On two of them, her tutor was once again left sprawling in the dirt, choking on blood. 

Asha just couldn’t seem to hold herself back.

“Oh no,” Asha muttered, “oh no no no.”

The Inquisition’s new formal uniform… was bad.

While Asha was having gowns commissioned for the Empress’ ball - somewhat against her will, although her feelings on that front were rapidly changing, as she tried to put her feet into these awful boots - they all needed uniforms for the negotiations they’d be conducting during the daytime in the Winter Palace. Josephine had several treaties she wanted to discuss with the Orlesian nobility, as well as the decaying remnants of the Chantry. The uniform would also helpfully double as formal wear for anyone who _didn’t_ feel like spending ludicrous amounts on dresses, robes, or suits. Instituting a formal Inquisition outfit offered a convenient excuse to wear the same clothes four nights running.

Though Asha currently couldn’t imagine anyone relishing _that_ particular prospect. This outfit was the most suffocating, uncomfortable thing she had ever put on her body. And she’d worn armour, near constantly, for almost half a year.

Luckily, someone (probably Vivienne, if she was honest), had vetoed Josie’s initial suggestion of crimson, the Chantry’s symbolic colour for Andraste. That would have meant everything was beyond saving. Instead, the uniform was black, with silver buttons and silver-gold embroidery around the cuffs, collar and shoulders, accompanied by a deep red sash fastened with a broach in the shape of the Inquisition’s eye. The unaltered form had clearly not been made with elven bodies in mind. It sat heavy on her frame with all the grace of a burlap sack, the tunic falling almost comically to her knees, its boxy shoulders slumping and collapsing inwards. She felt like she was _drowning_ in material.

And that really wasn’t the worst of it.

“Why are the gloves _like this_ ,” she hissed through the curtain, to Ellana on the other side. 

“I’m smaller than you, imagine how I’m doing,” El muttered. She was right - the thick, unwieldy suede gloves came up to Asha’s elbow, already, which meant they might genuinely be around Ellana’s armpits. “It’s like I’m about to apprentice in a blacksmith forge.”

“Or check the dilation of a pregnant halla,” Asha whispered back, fighting off laughter.

“...Well, congratulations, Ash, you made it worse. _Somehow._ ” Ellana said, with a long-suffering sigh. “Do I even _need_ a uniform? Can’t I just be a tastefully dressed civilian?”

“...When have you ever been 'tastefully dressed'?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“Are you both ready?” Came Josie’s voice from outside the curtain. “The tailor has almost finished with Cassandra and Cullen!”

A temporary salon had been erected by the Inquisition tailors in the war room and Josephine’s office, with members of the Inquisition cycling through the two rooms for their fittings and adjustments. Asha peered around the curtain of her hastily assembled dressing room, hoping the ambassador hadn’t heard too much of their hissed conversation. Luckily, Josie had sounded rather harried, and wasn’t even standing by the doorway, just moments after their summons were delivered. 

Asha stepped out from her makeshift cubicle and almost instantly regretted it. The boots felt more like the ungainly kind of waders you’d use for deep river fishing. She was walking like she’d just completed a very long and arduous horseback ride. 

Who _needed_ this much leather? In any outfit that wasn’t designed to be waterproof, or for, you know, fetishwear?

“Oh no,” she murmured, as she saw El come out of the other side, grimacing with the same discomfort. El’s tunic… went _past_ her knees. It was a rare occasion that Asha managed to look at all better than her sister, but Ellana really did just look like an unhappy tunic in boots. They shared a determined look, then attempted to traverse the twenty steps out of the war room and down the hallway in their new, strange, bowlegged stride. Asha was really quite proud to make it as far as Josie’s office door, _before_ she dissolved into giggles.

“This… is… absurd,” she gasped, shaking with laughter as her mind’s eye pictured her walking up to Empress Celene like she had some kind of grievous infection in her nethers.

“Does every room in the Winter Palace have fucking handholds? Or I’m _definitely_ going to fall over,” Ellana whispered back, and then they were both snorting with laughter again, unable to stop. 

As they tumbled the last step through the door, Asha realised their slightly deranged entrance had drawn the attention of everyone in the room.The tailor - one of Vivienne’s contacts - looked disdainful, as Asha supposed you would if two people were sniggering over the clothes you’d designed. Josie looked dismayed at the way the outfits puddled around their bodies, and Leliana, who’s own outfit was now repinned and tight-fitted to her own frame, was smirking. Cassandra looked about as overjoyed with their outfit choice as Asha was feeling. Although, frankly, she definitely wore it better: not only was hers now pinned in place, she had shoulders that justified the addition of pauldrons. And Cullen…

Asha froze up, mouth going completely dry. 

Suddenly, these outfits made _a lot_ of sense. Up to, and including - Creators damn her - the boots. 

A flush of warmth flooded through her, starting from her head and coursing all the way down, tangibly, through her toes. She all of a sudden became conscious of every part of herself, from her ungainly feet in these stupid boots to the swamping fabric of this stupid tunic to her thrumming heartbeat and no doubt flushing cheeks. Her fingers practically tingled. It was a feeling she was very familiar with, and she knew exactly what it meant.

 _Oh no_ , she thought.

By some miracle, instead of just saying that out loud, she somehow managed to straighten, open her mouth, and ask, quite sensibly: “how come he gets a cape? _I_ want a cape.”

Cullen Rutherford did, indeed, have a cape. Or rather, a half-cape, dangled artistically off one shoulder in a ripple of fabric that did unfair things to Asha’s insides. It was black with a deep crimson lining, and the same pattern of silver filigree embroidered around the hem. It looked practically sinful - less like he was knight from a courtly love story, and more of a rogue from one of the serials Cassandra was always gushing about. She thought he must be standing taller, in order to keep it on, because she was suddenly aware of how very tall he was. In fact, the whole colour scheme, really, did some really quite alarming things to his general aesthetic that made Asha wonder if his hair had always been so golden, if his eyes had always reminded her of the honey whiskey she’d gotten drunk on, two nights before…

“You can have a cape, Inquisitor,” Josephine answered, helpfully, as Ellana tugged her into the room and they both waded over. Suddenly, the way she was walking didn’t seem hilarious, just mortifying. 

“I mean, I’m pretty sure there’s enough excess fabric here for about twenty capes,” Asha joked weakly, plucking at her clothes that hung off her. She glanced at Cullen, but found she was able to keep banter up better if she actually looked slightly to the left of his shoulder, at a very nice and unassuming bookshelf that was suddenly her favourite bookshelf in Thedas. “Are you going to wear your fancy cape all the time, Commander? Or is it like, the kind of thing you can only whip out for special occasions?”

“Not all of us are receiving five thousand gold per Halamshiral dress, Inquisitor.” he observed blandly. “Even though _some_ of us are managing the mining excavations that will make such a budget possible.”

“If you’ve secretly wanted a pretty dress this entire time,” she replied, grinning despite herself, “I’m sure you only needed to ask us nicely.”

“Hilarious. You’re truly hilarious, Inquisitor.”

“The Commander can wear a cape because, as someone who reached the rank of Knight-Commander within the Templar Order, he is entitled to it, according to Orlais’ sumptuary laws,” Josephine piped up.

“Why not a full cape?” Asha asked.

“Only _chevalier_ are worthy of full capes,” Cullen said, dryly, “knights from orders outside Orlais must... make do.”

“Goodness. Your fortitude in the face of such suffering is an inspiration to us all. Only half a cape! How will you survive? Who knew Halamshiral would entail such _hardship_?”

“Your work at Adamant has been officially recognised as earning you the rank of Knight Enchanter,” Josie added, “meaning you would also make the cut, if you desired to add a cape to your own uniform.”

“What’s the Orlesian policy on duels? I feel like a cape like that,” Asha gestured over at Cullen, and then immediately regretted it, because it meant she was looking at him again. “Definitely needs to be broken in with at least one duel. Shall we pay someone to insult my honour while we’re there?”

“I’m pretty certain that’s going to happen at some point anyway,” Ellana pointed out.

“I have no objections,” Asha said. “As long as I’m wearing a cape at the time.”

“And… that would be your duelling stance, would it?” Cullen asked with a quick glance downwards, fighting a smile. Asha looked down as well, and realised her legs were splayed out to accommodate the sheer amount of boot. Her face flamed.

“Alright, _shem_ ,” she said, embarrassment making her indignant. “We can’t all be absurdly tall. I, for one, was never informed that the Winter Palace is seemingly about two foot underwater. I fear for Varric’s safety. Have we considered whether maybe Celene just… drowns?”

Cullen chuckled, then winced and hastily covered the laugh with a poorly pantomimed cough, as the _couturier_ ’s assistant seemingly poked a pin into his arm with too much fervour. 

Asha always found making him laugh to be a small kind of victory, because he was alwaysso very, profoundly serious. But seeing the wry twist of his smile as he covered it with his gloved hand, in this moment, felt different. By the Creators, it even made her fingertips tingle. So much so that she flexed them inside her ugly, halla-nursing and/or blacksmithing gloves, and felt how sweaty her palms suddenly were against the material.

_Fuck._

“I’m sure you’ll look quite dashing, Asha, once the tunic is bought in” Josie said, trying to smooth out the situation. “I agree with Lady Vivienne, this colour scheme is definitely an improvement on my initial designs.”

“I mean, just look at Cullen!” Ellana said, with a gleeful glance and an eyebrow wiggle in Asha’s direction. Her sister’s delight made her stomach hurt. If she was suddenly… feeling _like this_ , she wondered how much this vision must be stacking points up, in Ellana’s mind. Asha looked at him again, sidelong, and was dismayed to find that her aching stomach did some awful swooping thing, to the point where she thought she might actually be sick. 

Cullen started blushing, under the weight of unabashed scrutiny from every woman in the room. And Dread Wolf take her, that just made the swooping fucking _worse_ , because he was just Cullen again. Cullen, in a gorgeous outfit.

Oh, fuck. Swooping was so, so bad.

“This is, of course, why there is a need for tailored fittings in the first place,” continued Josie, thankfully oblivious to the personal meltdown Asha was having, standing right next to her. “And I’m sure the boots can be… negotiated.”

Asha seemingly wasn’t able to breathe properly, until she was alone. Even after Cullen and Cassandra both left to change back into their normal clothes, the... impact of her realisation, made in the presence of her _fucking spymaster_ , set Asha entirely on edge. She hoped that her mortification could be attributed to the tailor’s assessing gaze, to the gloves, to the boots, to _anything_ , other than the way her heart was racing and her mind was whirring to catch up with her own colossal stupidity. As the tailors poked, and prodded, and tutted, and no doubt said some very uncomplimentary things in Orlesian, she felt like the entire outfit, that drowned her in fabric, had suddenly become five sizes too small.

It had been inevitable, she tried to tell herself, as she slumped down on the sofa in her quarters.

It was so inevitable, in fact, that she was absolutely certain it _didn’t mean anything_ , she reasoned, as she started hyperventilating.

It meant absolutely nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Nothing at all. Really, it was just a logical consequence of her being a member of the Inquisition, if you thought about it. She’d worked through the intense feelings triggered by Cassandra’s muscles. She’d lusted after Krem, and Harding, and Skinner. She’d been appreciative of Dorian’s general demeanour, the way one might admire a particularly beautiful oil painting. She’d kissed Solas, because being alone together in the Fade was all kinds of sexy. If she was honest, she was quite surprised that she’d bypassed the ‘falling hopelessly in love with Josephine’ phase, which she would’ve considered more in-line with her overall character, but really, she could blame that on the nature of half-capes and dress uniforms.

There was no reason to worry over having a teensy crush on Cullen Rutherford. She was, after all, as she was fond of reminding herself, a person with eyes.

There was nothing unusual or exceptional about it. She'd basically just joined forces with the majority of Skyhold’s population. Possibly become a part of its largest shared demographic. No one thought someone who liked chocolate was weird - surely the same principle applied here.

But. It was just… she was scheduled to spar with him tomorrow - the first session since the rib breaking incident. And then they had a chess game planned for the day after. And there was the fact that _he obviously liked her sister_...

With a groan, she buried her head in her hands. So _that_ was why she’d been getting sleepless nights, over the idea that he probably fancied Ellana.

“ _Fenedhis_ ,” she muttered. _Of course_ the moment he became unavailable would be the very moment her treacherous body decided to do this to her. 

She’d always known Cullen was attractive, in the abstract sense, but it hadn’t really seemed to affect her. Why she couldn’t have just gotten all… _this_ out of her system when they were still in Haven, and she hated him, she didn’t know. She could’ve just hate-fantasised about his pretty face from afar, and then moved on with her life, like any sensible, dignified person. Why did it have to be _now_ , when she was not only his _boss_ , but also capable of treating him like a person - when she truly considered him a friend?

She was, to put it mildly, so very fucking screwed.

 _Maybe it was just the dress uniform,_ she thought to herself, trying to not make that thought feel too much like a prayer. 

Maybe it was just a one-off, freak incident, and everything would be fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Asha: "oh, woe is me! why do I only start liking Cullen now that I've had shared experiences with him and know more about him as a person?!?!?!"  
> My demisexual ass, looking at the screen as I post this: "goodness, _I WONDER WHY_."
> 
> Hope you had as much fun with this chapter as I did writing it!
> 
> Author's note: because one must always cite their sources, this version of the Halamshiral costume is partially inspired by [this fanart on tumblr](https://lizzart-zardonicz.tumblr.com/post/618848983550394368/its-orlesian-party-time-some-self-indulgent). I already use a mod that makes the Halamshiral uniform black, silver, and red, and in my fic they're still wearing tunics etc. but this fanart was too good not to reference directly. If you've never seen it before, you are _so welcome_.


	61. Chapter Sixty-One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time to earn that 'mutual pining' tag.

It was not just the dress uniform, it was not just a one-off freak accident, and everything was _not_ fine.

Asha felt like she was going mad. 

It was like she’d been handed a telescope (cursed by Fen’Harel, probably, the trickster bastard). She’d held it up to her face, and then adjusted the sight slightly, to be rewarded with a stunningly magnified and terrifyingly clear new vision.

She fancied the pants off Cullen Rutherford.

It was _awful_.

Asha had always been a travesty in front of the people she fancied. She often just ended up blurting out her feelings and hoping they found the whole performance endearing enough to accept her. If only to end the anxiety-ridden torture of interacting with them on excruciatingly uncertain ground. 

In this situation, she didn’t _have_ that option - because there was no scenario in which she never had to see the person in question again, if a babbled confession didn’t turn out in her favour. Asha felt she had to maintain some degree of professionalism. Imagine if she inadvertently caused a schism in a religious order, out of the sheer force of her own pure awkwardness? _While the Inquisitor was a heretical savage, it was her inappropriate and unreciprocated desire to bone down with the Commander of her armies that spelt an end for her organisation_. That was _not_ how she wanted to be remembered in any history books. Surely she could keep her pants on, and her mind out of the gutter, for the sake of Thedas?

She decided to act, to the best of her ability, like everything was normal.

War room meetings became torture. She felt newly self-conscious about her every decision. She didn’t want to _please_ Cullen, exactly. Quite frankly, some of his plans were foolish to the extreme, and she kept sending his men off to collect resources, rather than have them inadvertently menace the population. But she did want to _impress_ him. She wanted to do a good job in a way she hadn’t before. It was a little embarrassing, honestly, that the attention of a man became her new motivation, when she already held the fate of the world on her shoulders. Any time she spoke in a war room meeting, her skin began crawling with what she imagined to be the feeling of his eyes on her. And she had to speak in those meetings. _A lot_.

It was so very much effort, to keep herself acting reasonable and unaffected, maintaining the same level of teasing banter and carefully feigned disinterest, out of fear that Leliana would realise just exactly what was going on. Asha left nearly every war room meeting with a headache, the tension leaving her body in a heady rush that she learnt to savour, as the days of suffering this newfound malady became _weeks_.

And sparring? 

Asha was sure that if she had been born a Circle mage, forced to undergo a Harrowing, sparring with this new, suddenly hotter version of Cullen Rutherford would be her test, masterminded by the most evil desire demon in all the Fade. 

“I need to learn how to get past your fucking shield,” she blurted, without any preamble, as they met on the training ground. She figured that the quicker she got down to business, the less she’d notice the way her stomach fluttered with nerves at the idea of being close to him. Luckily, she’d had the mortifying excuse of having broken his ribs, to explain away how flustered she was. 

Even though, days ago, that wouldn’t have meant anything at all.

“Yes, I rather expect you do,” Cullen said, as he strapped the offending item to his arm. The tone of his voice, dryly amused as if he was completely used to her stilted mode of conversation, sent a thrill through her rather than just leaving her indignant. Which, if anything, pissed her off more. Everything sort of pissed her off, right now, to be honest: his new armour was inlaid with summerstone, and she absolutely _hated_ the way it complimented his stupid red cloak and bought out the golden tones in his desert tan and buttery blonde of his hair. 

“So, how would you do it?”

“Hmm?” she said, pulling herself out of her stupor. She’d really hoped that her question would trigger one of his predictable monologues, so that she could just stare at him for a while and acclimatise herself to the perils of being in close proximity. 

“How would you get past my shield?”

“Other than by breaking your ribs? I guess I’d do what I always do - sneak around to the back, or fade step there, or place some mines on the ground behind you, in the hope that you’re so focused on protecting your front that you trigger it.”

“All valid options.” 

She had to fight the answering smile that threatened to break out on her face. This was fucking _absurd_. That wasn't even _praise_. His acceptance of her statements of the obvious was nothing to feel proud over.

“And without magic?”

“Um…”

“Tell me honestly.”

“...I guess I’d probably wait for Cass to pummel you to the ground.”

“Yes,” he sighed. “That’s the first lesson - it will always be easier to take down a templar with more than one person present. We’re used to being sent out in teams, against single apostates. A templar in armour is far from mobile. Isolate us. More than one assailant, and we’re easily overwhelmed.”

“So, you’ve got me making life deliberately difficult for myself?”

“You sealed that fate when you chose to train with Cassandra Pentaghast,” he informed her, with a smile that struck straight to her heart.

_Keep it fucking together, Ashatarsylnin_. She reprimanded herself, in Deshanna’s voice. “So what are my options, in this difficult life I’ve so foolishly chosen? I’ve read that my spirit blade can’t cut through templar shields.”

“Yes, that’s true. They’re designed to be magic resistant. They’re, well,” he cast an apologetic glance at her, “typically made from the same metal as a lyrium brand.”

“Fabulous. Fucking fabulous.” She meant it, actually. Reminding herself of all the reasons why this new infatuation bordered on unhealthy worked to temper it a fraction, which she was immensely grateful for.

“Your instincts the last time we fought were correct. You need to risk close combat in the hope you can get inside my - or any templar’s - guard. The shield is primarily designed to deflect ranged attacks. It quickly becomes a hindrance in close quarters.”

“If you’re against someone strong, maybe,” she muttered, failing not to sound bitter. That shield had simply knocked her down, again and again, whenever she’d managed to get close.

“You’re strong, Asha,” he told her, in a serious tone that told her he meant it. And any distance Asha had managed to cultivate for herself dissolved.

Spending the next hour roughly ten inches from the Commander, as he demonstrated all the ways she could duck past his shield arm, didn’t help matters. Multiple times, he wrapped his hand on hers around her sword hilt, dwarfing her fingers in his own, to demonstrate the angles that best compromised his guard. She hoped the blazing sun overhead explained the blotchy, flushed, and sweaty aspect to her skin. She genuinely thought she might combust.

...Chess, though. That she found to be bearable. 

Thankfully, she actually knew how to play, these days. Had she been required to study his expression in the same minute detail as she had during their first few matches, she was almost certain that the entire ruse - both in terms of her cheating, and her new influx of dirty thoughts about everything he did - would’ve been discovered in under three seconds. Having a working understanding of the game meant that she could now keep her eyes pinned on the board, and pretend, perhaps, that she was playing against a particularly intelligent piece of furniture. A piece of furniture that, if she stared at the board long enough, became a frustratingly challenging opponent. During their games, her fantasies shifted focus from being most occupied by his body in relation to hers, to imagining what his expression would be like when she finally _fucking won_ , at this stupid game, with its stupid tiny wooden pieces.

Clearly, the Creators felt like she was dealing too well with Cullen, in those moments.

So, to reward her hubris, they gave her dancing lessons.

“Not. a. _word._ ” Asha said to both him and Ellana, when she arrived at practice not in her shirt and breeches, not even in a day dress, but in a horrific gown borrowed from Josie, that included a hoop skirt. She _knew_ she looked ridiculous. But she’d had her personal Halamshiral fitting the day before, and all the gowns were in the Orlesian style. Which meant that she needed to get used to having an ungainly dress skeleton between her and any prospective partner. She was trying to think of it as a particularly feminine form of weights training. 

“Not even to tell you how pretty you look?” Ellana said, innocently, as they all filed into the room. Asha scowled at her. The loaned dress gaped in certain, obvious places around the chest area, and was not designed to be worn by someone who was bare-faced and an hour fresh out of their bath. 

It was also beige. On Josie, the shade would have been probably called caramel, or topaz, or amber, but on Asha? It was profoundly _beige_.

They took up their habitual places at opposite sides of the room, and ran through the steps of today’s dance. All the while, Asha resolutely avoided making eye contact with Cullen. An ill-timed blush, whilst in a beige dress, would render her completely unattractive.

...Not that it mattered if he found her attractive or not. Because this crush would pass, and then everything would go back to normal, and no one would know about her brief, irrational bout of Cullen-fancying.

Soon they broke into pairs, as they always did. With Solas still absent, the numbers were a lot more equal, though Bull showed no signs of improving. “Dorian, dear,” Vivienne said, “would you mind partnering with our dear Inquisitor? She needs someone who can help her practice manoeuvring around in those skirts.”

Asha glanced over at Dorian - who was a charming, confident, and entertaining dance partner - and tried not to let her face fall. If he partnered off with Asha, that probably meant Cullen and Ellana would be paired, as they had been a few times in the last few weeks. She told herself it didn't bother her.

Dorian, in turn, was taking in her mullish expression, and the full impact of the beige monstrosity. “Well, Vivienne,” he said, blithely. “Why on this earth would you think _I_ am the one to have expertise, in that particular area? If they wore skirts, I tended not to dance with them. Might I volunteer our Commander, instead?”

_Oh you wonderful, terrible bastard_. Asha didn’t know if she wanted to kiss the other mage or punch him. She tried to act indifferent, but her traitorous eyes strayed towards Cullen, to find him already watching her. Their gazes caught with a force that Asha felt all across her skin. She quickly broke eye contact and looked down at herself in distress, wondering how bad the answering blush would likely be.

Vivienne hummed, “I suppose you’re right. Cullen, dear, if you please?”

“I - yes - of course,” he stuttered, but Asha couldn’t really hear him over the pounding of her own heartbeat in her ears. They all took their places, and Asha steeled herself. She couldn’t afford to fumble and sneak glances like she was a lovestruck teenager. Instead, she raised her head and looked him straight in his eyes.

His eyes, she’d found, had become a new focus of this cursed Dread-Wolf-spyglass-vision. Eirdhava had blue eyes and Mahanon had had green, so she’d never really considered the merits of brown before. But Cullen’s eyes weren’t quite brown - they were equal parts honey gold, and the amber warmth of whiskey. She didn't know why, but they reminded her of the comforting glow of a fireplace on cold nights.

Because she was lost to these fucking idiotic thoughts, she startled when the music started up, and hastily smoothed her sweaty palms down her skirt in preparation. She remembered how Solas had bowed elegantly and extended his hand to her like she was a princess. Cullen did none of that: he just stood there, awkwardly, waiting for the dance to begin.

But then, she was pretty certain Solas had been flirting with her, so why would she expect Cullen to mimic his behaviour in the slightest?

She held up her hand, palm up, in preparation for the first steps. He did the same, and she bit her lip when their hands touched, sparking awareness through her, and they began to circle round each other. 

His palms were callused - of course they were, he’d been a soldier his entire life. And there was nothing sexy about calluses, really. But that was what occupied her attention, as they completed a full turn then swapped palms and turned back the other way in absolute, Chantry-crypt levels of silence.

_Come on, Asha, you’ve got to do better than this!_ She needed a conversation to distract her - and he was her _friend_ , it shouldn’t be hard!

“The dresses I’m going to be wearing to the Winter Palace are actually much nicer than this!” she announced, suddenly, though Cullen hadn’t made any comments on her outfit whatsoever.

“Ah. Yes, I gathered,” he said, after a moment. The next part of the dance was the same turns but with arms entwined at the elbows, lines of forearms touching - really, _shem_ would do anything weird, and call it dancing. “I’d certainly hope that the amount we’re paying that tailor would result in something a little less, err…”

“Beige?”

“I was actually going to say ‘shiny’,” he replied. The fabric, she supposed, did have a sheen to it, that didn’t really help with the whole beige issue. She glanced up fractionally, saw his grin tugging slightly on the scar on his lip, and grinned back.

“Surely it makes sense for the more expensive things to be shinier?”

“In this case, perhaps I’d caution restraint.”

“So, are there to be no jewels on your fancy half-cape? How shall you survive?”

“Maker - am I ever going to hear the end of this?”

“Don’t worry, it was a very pretty half-cape, even without them,” she kept her voice light, as if flashbacks to him in the Halamshiral uniform didn’t keep her up at night.

They finished their spin and then Asha turned to face away from him, holding her hand outstretched as he moved to stand behind her. She swallowed as his hand came to the side of her waist, telling herself she couldn’t feel it burning through the fabric. And it was a pure figment of her imagination that she felt his chest stutter with a nervous breath behind her when she placed her hand over the top of his. There was no way he could be that close, with all her stupid skirts in the way. But regardless, their conversation suddenly died a brutal death as he steered her in a promenade.

“So,” she said, looking down at her feet, “where the fuck did you learn to dance?”

There was a shaky, understated laugh behind her, and it turned out she _did_ feel the vibrations of it through his arms where he held her, “that bad, am I?”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” _Not at all._ “I’m just - did they really court train their templars in Kirkwall? It seems like a criminal waste of resources.”

“No, they didn’t. I learnt to dance in Honnleath. The town was tiny, but it was the biggest place for miles, so we had to provide some form of society. My sister taught me, and then when I left home I got plenty of opportunities to practice. The town where we trained to be templars was also pretty dead in the water, honestly. Although it was frowned upon, if you’d banned recruits from the dances when they made up a good half of the numbers, there would’ve no point in having them in the first place.”

“So... you learnt to dance to impress the village girls?”

Cullen coughed, steering her in a turn that fanned her skirts out against his leg and then walking back the same way, “Isn’t that why everyone learns to dance? Ellana certainly thinks that was _your_ motivation.”

Hearing her sister’s name in his mouth, Asha felt a sour twist of jealousy that made her angry at herself.

“Wait? ...Honnleath?” she blurted, remembering a small, abandoned village that she’d passed through months ago. “Isn’t that a blight-ridden shithole near the Fallow Mire? _That’s_ your hometown?”

“The Blight was only ten years ago, Inquisitor,” Cullen replied, “it was nicer before. I can promise you, no undead menaced me in my sleep.”

“Wait a second - the _Blight_ is what fucked the Mire up so much? That’s... that's what _I_ said! I knew it! I fucking knew it! I’ll have to tell Solas, when he gets back!”

Cullen fell silent behind her. She supposed it was a bit insensitive to be crowing over her pet theory behind his home’s demise. She craned her neck to look back at him, “sorry! I mean, it must have been very, _very_ sad to-”

And then she stepped on the leading hem of her skirt.

The front of her dress, loose-fitting without a properly-cinched corset, was pulled several inches down with her weight, and she toppled forward, about to faceplant on the floor.

“ _Motherfucke-_ ” the curse was cut short as, before she lost her footing, Cullen’s arm looped around her front and clutched her around the middle like a vice. The word was lost in a huff of breath as he tugged her back against him.

“Are you alright, Asha?” he asked, as their abrupt halt brought all the other dancers to stop as well.

“Hnggh,” aside from the fact that his arm clamped around her waist had practically winded her, Asha found that she could not form words. Her brain had decided it was time for a vacation, at the sensation of being wrenched almost off her feet, and against the hard plane of his chest.

“Ah, my apologies!” Cullen said, dropping his grip hastily. Asha stumbled a few steps forward, wheezing a little. 

And then he blinked twice, looking slightly stunned and almost like he couldn’t believe his luck, before he hastily looked down at the floor and blushed all the way to the tips of his ears. 

The loss of his arm meant that all the scrunched-up, heavy fabric of her dress once again fell a few more inches down. Asha glanced down at herself, and realised that, while she was not flashing the room, it was an _extremely_ close thing… if only because she was wearing undergarments.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” she chanted, as Ellana broke from Dorian and rushed forward, hastily shielding her from view and helping her to tug it back into place. “This dress is _fucking_ cursed.”

Ellana giggled, “please let this happen in Orlais. I would _pay money_ to see this happen in Orlais.”

“Do not say that, because wherever she is Sera will hear it, and all my corset stays will be slashed, or... or... replaced with fucking _liquorice laces_ , or something!” Asha replied shrilly, trying to pass it off as a joke while avoiding eye contact with everyone in the room, and one person in particular.

This _had_ to be Fen'Harel's doing. Just one massive, cosmic level joke. Or actual, honest-to-gods madness.

That night, when Ellana stayed out late drinking with Sera and Blackwall, Asha lay alone in her bed. She stared wide-eyed at the ceiling, willing away flashbacks of the mortifying dress incident. But she was also desperately trying not to recall the feel of Cullen’s hands all over hers, the strength of his arm around her waist, or the heat of his chest against her back. 

_I will not masturbate to thoughts of a work colleague,_ she vowed, as she tried to stare Skyhold's stonework into submission, and to will away the thrumming pulse under her skin. She outright _refused_. She was practically a _professional saint!_ And even if she wasn’t, some lines just shouldn’t be crossed. 

She’d never had this problem with Solas! She needed to get this all under control!

Of course, for all her promises, her dreams proved a little less obedient than her waking thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sure that in their conversation while dancing, I directly contradict Cullen's statements about templars and dancing from the game, but I like my version better :)
> 
> Hope you enjoyed it! I think we're roughly two weeks of instalments away from Halamshiral... see you next week! x


	62. Chapter Sixty-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas returns to Skyhold.

Asha’s thoughts were so full of Cullen, and she was so preoccupied with trying to rid Cullen from her thoughts, that she didn’t notice when a month had passed, and Solas still hadn’t returned.

A new mission came in: Bull wanted to go to the Storm Coast to meet with his contacts in the Qun. Varric also had an issue regarding a cavern near Redcliffe and an ex-girlfriend, so it looked like they would be leaving Skyhold for three weeks or so. 

Asha had tried not to make a face when Varric had introduced her to Bianca Davri. Who she supposed was perfectly fine, really. Nothing offensive about her. But it was hard to look at her and not think of... well… the many, many perfections of Cassandra Pentaghast. Asha had been grateful to get this massive piece of gossip though: it had provided enough conversation to fill a whole chess game with Cullen, three days after the dress incident. She’d thought nothing would top his revelation that the Seeker secretly read all of Varric’s books, but it seemed a hidden ex-girlfriend was an unprecedented wildcard scenario, and clearly the only reason why Varric hadn’t pursued Cass properly, as far as she was concerned.

Asha was hopeful that this trip would do her good. A month or so away from Solas had been enough to deflate her crush on him quite effectively. So, she tried not to pay it any mind when she actually found herself feeling dread at the idea of leaving Skyhold. She didn’t understand why. Ellana was actually going to be joining them on their travels because both regions were stable and had a strong Inquisition presence, so it wasn’t like she’d be missing her. 

Ok, so she understood _exactly_ why she was feeling so morose. It was the same reason _why_ she was not only selfishly glad to have her sister’s company, but also selfishly glad to have a reason to separate Ellana and Cullen for a few weeks, so they wouldn’t fall hopelessly in love while Asha was away and unable to…

Stop it? Watch their romance play out and then use it as a means of numbing her own infatuation? Honestly, by this point, she didn’t know. She was rapidly losing patience with this side of her, and was therefore choosing to ignore it as much as possible.

“We have to swim in the sea, Ash!” Ellana demanded, as they all saddled up their horses and checked over their supplies in the courtyard. It was a large party of them going: Varric, Cassandra, Ellana, Dorian, Bull and all his Chargers.That numbered nearly half of the inner circle, and so all three advisors had come down from their respective offices to see them off. 

Cullen was standing off to the side, and looked vaguely horrified at this pronouncement, no doubt fearing for Ellana’s welfare. “You do realise that the Storm Coast-”

“Already done it, _da’lath’in_ ” Asha interrupted. “But I’ll gladly do it again! I’ve even bought some old clothes with me, this time round.”

“What? No repeat performance of our first night together?” Bull flung over his shoulder, as he adjusted the saddle on his own massive mount.

“Oh, Bull,” she grinned, pantomiming a swoon. "You know that was just a one time thing!”

“You _swam_ in the _Waking Sea_?” Cullen, it seemed, was still stuck on this point.

“No, no, no, Commander - she _skinny dipped_ in the Waking Sea, my man,” Bull said, coming over to clap him on the back. Cullen blinked at him a few times, and the Qunari smirked, “what? Has she never told you about the first time we met? When she got drunk, took off all her clothes, and then asked to spend the night with me and my boys?”

“Really, Inquisitor?” Dorian said, “how uncharacteristically forward of you - I’m scandalised! I thought being _that_ direct caused you to combust on the spot, or something.”

“I think you'll find that what actually happened is that I took off all my clothes, then ran in the _exact opposite direction to you_ , Bull,” Asha said, laughing. “Literally _into the sea_.” She glanced at Cullen, then glanced away and pretended to be explaining to the group, “to clarify: I was only mildly tipsy at the time. I just have strong feelings about the ocean.”

“You saying that our time together didn’t mean anything, Boss?” Bull acted wounded, “that you just skinny dip with _all the boys?_ ”

“And the girls, presumably,” Dorian added.

Ellana began waggling her eyebrows suggestively, having heard secondhand all of her sister’s Waking Sea-related escapades with Mahanon. Asha bit her lip, “El. I am begging you, please don’t-”

Ellana turned to the group, and announced, “there was actually this one time? When she was seventeen? And our mother could not, for the life of her, work out where she was…”

“-El, my gods, please, no-”

“Please, yes,” Varric grinned, “do go on, Summer. I smell a story.”

“Well, you see, she was dating this very… _athletic_ fisherman at the time…”

“Isn’t that… Solas?” Cassandra suddenly said, squinting and craning her neck to look around Asha’s shoulder. Asha could’ve kissed her - she didn’t care if Solas was actually there, or if it was just a diversionary tactic, she would take whatever she could get at this point just to avoid admitting that she’d had to walk through the Lavellan camp almost entirely naked...

No, wait - _Solas?_

Asha followed the woman’s gaze to see a familiar, reedy figure strolling through the gates of Skyhold. Her friend had finally returned.

The walk to Skyhold had been lonely, in a way Solas had not known since he’d first walked the world after waking. The heaviness of grief held a similarly painful, ungainly quality to when he’d had to acclimatise himself to the weight of once more having a body, once he’d woken to find that all his world and his fury had left him. It wasn’t Wisdom he mourned, exactly, but the passing of a world where the knowledge it carried wasn’t so very, very essential. So much had been lost, and he was the one who’d lit the kindling on the fire that burned it all to the ground.

Would he have come back here, were it not for her? He knew he had reasons to be amongst the Inquisition, ones that he could not ignore, but it had hardly been the thoughts of those ever-so-lofty goals which drove him forward with each heavy step. His thoughts had been simpler. Indulgently soft.

He glanced around _Tarasyl'an Te'las_ \- which churned with people, these days, after all its years standing alone. Solas knew it was a foolish hope that Asha was somehow stood here among them, waiting for him to return -

Suddenly, a force barrelled into him from the side, arms wrapped around his shoulders and squeezed him tight. He got a mouthful of bright, coppery hair, despite it apparently being tied back in a long braid. “You’re back!” she said, his voice muffled into his shoulder, “gods, you’ve been gone fucking _ages_. I should’ve sent out search parties! I’m such a bad friend!”

“ _Lethallan_ ,” he murmured, placing a hand on her shoulder. And because he was a weak man, he rested his cheek against the top of her head for a second, and wondered if he could pretend this was what he was destined for.

But then, suddenly, she broke away and stepped back from him, taking him in. He took the opportunity to do the same, eyes running over her figure. Her hair was tied back - neatly, for her - and she wore her light armour, with her staff and spirit blade hilt strapped to her person. “It seems I have come at a bad time,” he said, before frowning, as he noticed a new detail. Underneath her black _vallaslin_ ink, there was a small yellowing bruise bisecting her left eyebrow, spreading over across her forehead like ochre.

Asha was also frowning, crossing her arms as she drank in his appearance with a concerned look. “You need a meal, or three - you’re looking more ‘hobo’ than usual. Don’t let Vivienne see you. She’s going to have a lot of criticism all bottled up inside, with no Halamshiral lessons on the horizon, and the stick rammed permanently up her ass ...Wait a second. Where’s your horse?”

It said a lot about how far Solas had fallen, that he blinked at this, genuinely unable to give an answer. “I - uh -”

“Mythal’s tits - did you lose your horse!?”

“My horse?”

“We left it at the camp for you, in case you came back for it." Asha paused, horrified amusement dawning on her face. "Solas, _did you leave your horse with that poor requisition officer in the Exalted Planes?_ ”

“ _Lethallan_ ,” he tried to recover the situation, “that rather implies that _you_ left my mount-”

She looked up at him and grinned wide, giving a whoop of laughter. “You moron! You walked, barefoot, from the Exalted Plains to here? When you didn't even _have to?_ You're never allowed to insult the Dalish again. What did that sad, abandoned horse ever do to you?”

There was something about her smile - it was somehow wider and brighter than it had been in a long time. It tugged at Solas’ heart, for the last time he’d seen her smile like that it had been in the Fade, on the cliff-face by her clan’s home, before she - before they - 

He looked up to where she’d come from and saw her party, her sister amongst them. He supposed that would explain it, then. He dare not hope the smile was for him.

“You are injured,” he observed, reaching up to rub his thumb against the wound. She caught his wrist, batting it away lightly in a gesture that held no ill will, and ducked out of the way before he could fully reach over.

“That is a weak distraction tactic, to drag my attention away from your poor orphaned horse,” she said, smiling. She rubbed at it herself self-consciously, smoothing the back of her hand over the bruise. “It wasn’t enough of an injury to bother healing, really. I got it while sparring with Cullen. I _may_ have tried to headbutt him, and it _may_ have backfired, spectacularly. You will no doubt soon notice that he is without a scratch.”

Because her hair was tied back, Solas noticed when the tips of her ears began to heat, as a blush began to spill across her cheeks.

“But… enough about me! What about _you?_ Are _you_ ok?”

“I… yes. I have had time to come to terms with Wisdom’s passing. I visited the place in the Fade where it used to be. As you predicted, there are stirrings of energy in the Void. The loss hurts, but it always does - as you well know. I’m sure I will survive.” 

“Well, if you ever need someone to talk about it, you can come to me,” she said, her expression sorrowful. “I mean, when I get back. From the Storm Coast… you’re right - it is rather a bad time...”

“Ellana goes with you?”

“Well, I was discussing it with Cullen and Leliana,” the Inquisitor seemed to fight an urge to look at the people she mentioned, and hid it under fidgeting, “there’s such a big party of us going, and we decided that it’s safe enough, given the fact that we now fully control both regions. There’s that red templar stronghold on the coast, but we’ll just make sure Ellana stays well clear.”

“I could join you?” When the question led to a bemused look, Solas admitted, “I’m… sorry to have so nearly missed you. And,” he gestured at the pack on his shoulder, “I hardly need to prepare for travel.”

_I missed you_ , were the words underlying that half-truth. He’d thought that it was his duty to mourn Wisdom’s death alone, as he was accustomed, as he had when he mourned the passing of the Evanuris and the golden age of Arlathan. But every night, as he had tried to reconcile himself to the loss and move forward with his plan, he had found his final thoughts before sleep always dwelled on Asha. 

Her forehead puckered, and she bit her lip indecisively, bringing back memories he’d decided it was futile to fight. “I… don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said, finally, surprising him. “I mean… look at you. You’re worn out. And you _hated_ the Storm Coast. Instead of three weeks of rain, you need three weeks of hot food, and being nice and cosy in your library. That's an Inquisitorial decree!"

"Is it now?"

"But also… you have no horse.” 

Despite the sting of rejection, Solas found himself smiling, slightly. “There are worse orders to follow, I suppose,” he said, glancing down at her, “maybe when you get back we could-”

Suddenly, Ellana appeared at her sister’s elbow, tugging on her sleeve. “ _Cullen has a meeting he needs to go to, and he’s already late,_ ” she muttered to Asha in elvhen. “ _You should say goodbye._ ”

“... _Why are you speaking in elvhen?_ ” Asha asked, confused. “ _Solas speaks elvhen_.”

“ _Yes, but Cullen doesn’t_.”

“ _...He can still hear his name though_.”

Ellana sighed, “ _Ash, can you please just come say goodbye to Cullen, and then you can talk to Solas?_ ”

“ _Solas literally just got back-?_ ” Asha said, still frowning, “ _Why… do you need me to keep you company while you say goodbye to Cullen?_ ”

“ _No, asa’malin, I do not need you to come help me say goodbye to Cullen, but he is standing around waiting to say goodbye to you. He’s too polite to say anything, so I’m doing it for him,_ ” Ellana said, clearly becoming exasperated. “ _You don’t mind, do you, Solas?_ ”

Truth be told - though he had no right and he wished that, after all these years, he was a more sensible man - Solas could find many reasons to _mind_ the Commander’s behaviour, all of which were petty and foolish. But he couldn’t say that, of course, so he merely nodded, “by all means.”

Asha beamed gratefully at him, and then jogged back to where the Commander stood. The man seemed rather alarmed at the whole conversation, and multiple uses of his name. She tilted her head up to look at Cullen, and they began to talk in muted voices. As Solas watched them interact from afar, he realised there was something marginally different in the Inquisitor’s demeanour - a difference that was oddly familiar to him. He watched her with newly keen awareness, seeing the absent-minded way she tucked non-existent hair behind her ear as the Commander said something to her and her neck began to flush red. 

“So,” Ellana said, suddenly, from where she still stood next to him. He’d almost forgotten she stood there, as he watched Asha. “I hear you broke my sister’s heart.”

Solas blinked at her, a little flustered by the accusation. Though small and unassuming, with a neutrally beatific look on her face should any passersby glance at them, Ellana’s unimpressed look was very reminiscent of her sister. “She told me all about it,” she informed him, “about how you sweet-talked her for weeks, and then took her on a date to some fancy mage place in your minds, before leaving her high and dry.”

“I - did she describe it like that?”

“Of course not,” Ellana glared, “but I can read between the lines.”

Solas glanced towards Asha, a spike of pain in his chest. He’d thought he was doing the right thing, but he was still haunted by the confused, hurt look she’d given him in the dark on the road to Crestwood. It had never been her fault, that he had overstepped boundaries she couldn’t even see… 

Suddenly, Asha snorted with laughter while Cullen blushed at her amusement, and the spike became razor edged and barbed. 

It began to dawn on him, exactly what he was seeing.

Ellana was stood next to him, arms folded. He couldn’t conjure a response that explained his intentions in a way that gave adequate justification. What came out of his mouth, instead, was pathetically weak. “She never _seemed_ heartbroken.”

Another lie. She’d definitely been pained, at the time. But, in all his selfishness, it had chafed him a little how quickly she was able to return the relationship to where it had safely resided before that whole debacle. He knew it was the absolute height of hypocrisy to complain that someone so easily let him go, given that that was exactly the outcome he’d wanted. 

He was the one who had ended things before they even started, so why was he the only one still clinging onto its remnants?

“Then you clearly know nothing about my sister,” Ellana said dismissively. “You weren’t some drunken tumble - although honestly, she even gets attached to those, sometimes. She wouldn’t have risked kissing someone she worked with, if it didn’t mean something to her at the time. But she probably hid it under smiles and tried to smooth the way for you as best she could, at her own expense. She probably tried to pretend everything was normal, knowing her.” She looked satisfied, at the way Solas winced, “she’s both stupidly open and bloody-mindedly closed. That’s why I’m telling you this - I want you to understand what you did.”

“I do. Of course I do,” he murmured. He was a fool, not an idiot. It had seemed like a kindness, at the time, knowing how much more it would hurt when he eventually left. But it was his lack of restraint that had put them into that situation in the first place. He should’ve been better at holding his thoughts, and himself, back.

“And exactly what you’ve lost,” Ellana continued, relishing the words the same way an Antivan Crow would relish a killing blow. She glanced over at her sister again and Solas followed her line of sight, just in time to be witness to one of the most awkward, shuffling hugs he’d ever seen. Asha and Cullen both hesitantly put their arms out, then stilted and retracted them, before both forging ahead once they saw that they’d already had the consent of the other party and mashing themselves almost aggressively into an embrace. 

When he’d first met Asha Lavellan, he could never have imagined her hugging a templar. 

In all the scenarios in which he’d made his peace with distancing himself from the Inquisitor, Solas had to suddenly admit there’d been a single, embarrassing blind spot. Perhaps it was overly ambitious, or merely selfish of him... but he’d never imagined having to see her with someone else, before they inevitably parted ways. Certainly not someone who...

“Have you ever seen it?” Ellana asked suddenly, while Solas was busy drowning in the depths of his own foolishness.

“Seen... what?”

“Her brand.” El said. 

“...No,” Solas said, surprised at the question. He hadn’t. Not even in those first days, when he’d known nothing about the violation it would pose and had simply been trying to keep her alive. His magic had been so focused on maintaining the stability of his own mark, that he hadn’t even registered the negative space of the lyrium brand on her skin. 

El sighed, “I haven’t either. I know it’s on her back. She refused any backless gowns for the Winter Palace.”

“I believe the only other person to have seen it was the Nightingale, who confirmed its existence.”

“Good.” Ellana said. “I’m glad she didn’t trust you with it, if you were just going to leave her.”

Part of Solas - the part that belonged to the person he once was, who no one would ever question the decisions of - riled defensively. “I - that’s hardly fair. I would never presume, to ever have left her, after something like-”

“Done!” Asha announced, suddenly bouncing into view. The happiness with which she’d greeted him had increased ten-fold, from a single beam of sunlight to a blaze worthy of the Western Approach. Her cheeks were bright and flushed. She glanced behind, almost as if unable to help herself, and then waved at the retreating figure of the Commander who, blushing and nonplussed, waved back.

“How was Cullen?” Ellana asked.

“Good! Really good, actually!” Asha grinned a little too wide again, and then checked herself. “I mean, I think we may have permanently scarred him with the idea that we skinny-dip in the Waking Sea as kind of a Clan Lavellan past-time, which is absurd because the man is from Ferelden and so being cold should be _his_ favourite pastime-”

“-He did _live in Kirkwall._ ” _In the Gallows,_ Solas thought, and found that couldn’t help the petty, deliberate emphasis he put on the reminder, even as he winced to hear it in his own voice.

Luckily, it was covered over by Ellana’s own interjection. "-Oh, I’m _pretty certain_ the Commander could be brought round to skinny-dipping at the Storm Coast. _Someone_ could persuade him. _Somehow_.”

“Yes, yes, _da’lath’in_ , bards and lore keepers will tell of the allure of my naked sister for all the ages to come, and it is _absolutely_ a topic I want to think about,” Asha replied flatly, completely missing her sister’s very obvious point.

Solas decided it would be better if she _kept_ missing it.

“...Wait,” he said, as the brain of one of the greatest minds of the Evanuris finally caught up with the turn of the conversation, “...when did you skinny-dip at the Storm Coast?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey pals, I'm back! Apologies for the fact that I missed a week of updates. Long story short: I was... in hospital. Nothing is wrong, I'm completely recovered and now perfectly fine at home. But yeah. Things like that will understandably delay an update. Things resume as usual this week :)
> 
> Author's note: can I just say? That hug between Cullen and Asha would've been the most romantic thing ever, had it been narrated from either of their POV. But instead we have Solas, so you have to see them from the outside in all their insufferably awkward glory.


	63. Chapter Sixty-Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skyhold in the lead-up to Halamshiral.

Travelling through the Hinterlands and the Storm Coast did absolutely nothing to cure Asha’s crush.

From the moment they re-entered the Crossroads and started down the road to Skyhold, her stomach became a churn of anticipation. It reached the point of almost feeling inappropriate - the Chargers tended to the wounds they had sustained before they retreated, while she fought smiles. Her mind wandered away from the conversation as Dorian tried his level best to reassure Bull that being Tal Vashoth wasn’t all that bad, even as it became clear that the mage had a rudimentary understanding of exactly what ‘Tal Vashoth’ even meant.

Of course, the _good_ type of anticipation - the thrill of excitement and the novelty of infatuation - only lasted until she was face to face with Cullen again. Then all the anxiety came flooding back in. She didn’t _want_ to be in a relationship. With a templar. She didn’t _want_ to find her colleague attractive enough to start acting like a moron around him. She didn’t want him for herself, but she also wasn’t enough of a masochist to watch him fall for anyone else.

But more than anything, she couldn’t bear the idea of putting him at arm’s length once more, even if it helped her recover from whatever this... this _was_. If she went back to ignoring him, he would think it was because she’d decided to hate him again, and she’d never be able to explain otherwise.

And so, the next few months continued in the same, torturous vein.

It seemed Vivienne kicked up a fuss about the Inquisitor always leaving Skyhold: preparations for Halamshiral became Asha’s top priority, and left her castle-bound. “I cannot perform miracles, especially when she flees every three weeks and undoes all my work," the First Enchanter told the war room, with a taut smile. She glanced at Asha, "You already have all those muscles, we can’t also have you turning up to the Winter Palace tanned as a farm-hand. Dear.”

The morning after that particular comment, Asha offered to help Cullen train new recruits to fight against magic. It necessitated three hours extra on the training ground every day, under the blazing summer sun.

Ellana no longer had to attend the etiquette lessons. _Ellana_ had learnt everything that she needed for the Winter Palace. It was her sister who would be addressing royalty, and it was Asha who was constantly forgetting everything she was taught the day before - or pretending to, whenever Vivienne did too much to piss her off.

And so Asha was now condemned to two hours a day, just her and Vivienne, glaring at each other from across a room as the other mage stretched out on her _chaise longue_ like a particularly stand-offish cat, drilling her in politics, history, manners, and address. Asha honestly did not know who hated these lessons more. Yes, Vivienne was a stone cold bitch. But sometimes Asha forgot to act like this wasn’t unspoken fact, and the way the fellow Knight Enchanter got under her skin meant that her behaviour became outright bratty.

In the end, the breaking point they reached was mutual, and over something absolutely trivial... even for Orlais. It wasn’t one of the titles or names that Asha - speaker of four languages - deliberately mispronounced and mangled. It wasn’t a result of her using one of the fan movements Vivienne taught her - that functioned like a secret language amongst the noblewomen of court - to signal she was up for an orgy, right this second, on the floor of the hypothetical ballroom. It wasn’t one of the times her practice in conversation descended into her hurling insults at Vivienne behind one of her newly cultivated, vapid, and ice-brittle smiles.

It was over the placement of her feet.

Gaspard de Chalons - the fucker, she was liking him less and less the more she learned about him - required a special type of curtsy. One that only _he_ got. He was the highest ranking Orlesian noble to ever become a Chevalier, but rather than getting on with their lives and deciding that either a curtsy for a nobleman or a curtsy for a Chevalier was good enough, Orlais had resurrected a century-forgotten curtsy to distinguish the accomplishment. One that Asha _could not get right_ \- mostly because, to her, it was an indistinguishable mixture of the other two curtsies, which were already basically the same.

“Really, dear,” Vivienne said, as she bent again and her left foot slipped out of alignment for the fiftieth time. “It’s not that hard.”

Asha closed her eyes, straightened, and waited for the inevitable: “again.”

She did it, again. And got it wrong _again_.

“You _do_ realise-”

“Yes, Vivienne, I know.” Asha said, her voice terse. “I got it wrong.”

“Well, as long as we’re both on the same page,” the First Enchanter said. “Again.”

This time, Asha just bobbed in place, barely even moving. She knew it was wrong, and frankly, she didn’t give a fuck.

“ _Herald_...”

“You literally told me, three days ago, that Gaspard doesn’t give a _shit_ about etiquette! You said that he,” she switched her voice to her ‘Vivienne’ voice, knowing as she did it that she was pushing her luck, “‘displays open disdain for the Grand Game.’ Why would _he_ care, if I don’t give him his special, fancy, fuck-off curtsy!”

Vivienne raised a single eyebrow. “In what world, Herald, do you think this curtsy is for _Gaspard_?”

“ _...It’s his fucking curtsy._ ”

“Such displays are not for him, the man who’s wealth and birthright means he has the luxury of choosing to be unfashionable. It’s for everyone else who will watch you enter, at his right hand. Gaspard de Chalons will, in fact, be the only person in Halamshiral that you do not have to impress,” Vivienne told her, examining her nails.

“Because he invited me?”

“Because he’s already determined how he can use you. He’s had plenty of time to think of all the ways he can move you across the board. Best case scenario, he has Andraste’s prophet on his side. Worst case, he’s got a Dalish savage wreaking havoc, a perfect distraction for the moves he’s making behind the scenes. You're his tool, what does he care for your wellbeing?”

“You don’t have to say it like that, you know,” Asha said, glaring.

“What?... that you're a tool?" Vivienne's eyes flashed, enjoying the joke, "oh... or do you mean ‘Dalish savage’? It’s the least of what you’ll hear at the Winter Palace. I am merely trying to stop it from being true.”

Asha felt her cheeks heat. “Fuck you, Vivienne. I am _not_ uncivilised, just because I haven’t spent my life in lace, and the bedrooms of other people’s husbands.”

The moment it slipped out, she realised her grievous error and immediately began to regret it - both on moral and self-preservation grounds. Swear words didn’t bother Vivienne. Judgement, on the other hand… well, that did.

The only change in the First Enchanter’s demeanour was a complete smoothing out of her already very impassive expression: the difference between a still lake, and a frozen one.

“Yes, dear, you left your woodland clearing so very ‘cultured’.” the First Enchanter said, her voice cutting. “So, what would you prefer? ‘Knife-ear’? ‘Abomination’? ‘The heathen whore play-acting sainthood, hoping she doesn’t burn up on the Chantry step’?”

Before Asha could open her mouth to protest, Vivienne continued, barely pausing for breath, “You’ll hear all those and more, regardless of whether or not you actually succeed in learning even a margin of decorum within these walls. _I_ am a human woman, Duke Bastien de Ghislain’s mistress of near thirty years, and Celene’s foremost court advisor... and I have had every part of myself scrutinised and insulted, from my background to my heritage, to my magic, to my appearance. I have had people attempt to topple me merely for the sport, to prove to themselves they can at least try. Maker knows what they will do with you, an elf _and_ a mage, barely one year back in the world, proven to have colluded with the Kirkwall Abomination, with only three months of half-arsed court training to her name. You are bumbling into an court, hoping to befriend the mistress of an Empire known only to interact with elves she can bed, and who only gave _me_ an audience because she was four months into her crown and very, very _scared_. And you are _not taking it seriously_.”

Asha blinked, uncertain how to respond. And Vivienne was now in her stride.

“I know you think this is all so very _pedestrian_ , Herald. That you, with your enlightened past so very sheltered from the realities of Thedas - and freedom from, as far I can see, _any_ repercussions for your behaviour - are somehow above our foolish and pitiful diversions. But the Game is how an _Empire turns_. It is how I pulled myself up from nothing, and forged myself a life outside the cage I was destined for. It is how Drakon himself annihilated your people, and then amassed enough wealth to build palaces and castles on the bones when they were freshly turned in the earth. It is how Gaspard can cast a bloody swathe through the Eastern front, take away the husbands, wives, children, and siblings of half the court, and still walk into the palace of his enemy untouched, as if he has simply been away making his Grand Tour.

“Do you want the elves in Orlais to have a future? Do you want mages to be able to freely travel and cross the border? You have the chance to change the course of history, and you merely laugh at the tools with which you might endeavour to do so.”

Vivienne stood, and strode over to her. Embarrassingly, taking into account the heels she was wearing, Asha’s forehead barely reached her chin.That meant she was truly looking down her nose at her as she finished her tirade.

“I may not like you, Herald, but _I_ am not the one deliberately shirking my duties, and I am not the one who will profit if your attempts to learn remain pitiful. I am _trying_ to teach you. I find myself lying awake at night, wondering _how in the Maker’s name_ I will keep you alive long enough for you to make any meaningful mark on the firmament, and guessing whether I can name the person who, at this rate, will slip a knife under your ribs while you laugh at the pointlessness of whatever curtsy you have just mangled for your own amusement. Let me put this in terms you will understand, Herald: you fuck this up, you die. You will either be murdered, or you will _die meaningless_ , fifty years from now, remembering when you were offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fix all the things you so enjoy railing at me about, and chose instead to actively sabotage your chances at every turn.”

Rather than stride out of the room in a fit of rage, Vivienne instead simply folded her arms and narrowed her eyes, making it clear she was waiting for Asha to see herself out.

The next day, the lessons resumed with no comment from either party, and Asha nailed Gaspard’s stupid curtsy on the first try.

Summer at Skyhold had realised all of Ellana’s shirtless soldier-related ambitions. But an early autumn heatwave would also do the job perfectly well.

Asha wiped sweat from her brow as she squinted across the training field, which had long been worn away to smooth, dry dirt. As she did, she directed her stone behemoth to attack the soldiers flanking on its right hand side.

She and two Circle mages were puppetting three dirt constructs. As part of her agreement to help Cullen train the troops, she’d demanded to learn the spell which conjured them. It was a variation on a simple rock armour spell. Like rock armour, it wore away with attrition from others’ blows, but rather than using the person’s body as its skeleton, she instead shaped and moved the dirt as an autonomous object. Both her and Cullen had agreed it was a useful exercise - not only did it let her practice tactics against multiple soldiers, but it also forced her to think like a red lyrium templar would when attacking.

She winced sympathetically as her construct’s club arm came down on a soldier who hadn’t been prepared for it. He crumpled under the weight of the soil, and although all the mages tried to stop the impact short of wounding, she knew he’d at least be choking on a mouthful of dirt. The first time she’d been wailed on by one, her mouth had felt like she’d licked the ground in the Western Approach.

“Shields _up_ men!” came a bellow from the other side of the fray, where Cullen stood watching his soldiers work. Asha didn’t have the time to spare a glance at him. She wasn’t quite sure her heart could take it.

From her left, one of the two Circle mages, a pretty Orlesian called Noelle, let out a simpering giggle. She shared a look with her male companion, Dathen, who raised an eyebrow and nodded in meaningful agreement. While Asha ostensibly had her eyes on her behemoth, their actions were felt like claws down her spine.

“Pay _attention_ ,” she said tersely, a little concerned that her voice came out as sharp and assertive as the Commander’s. Normally, she tried to act like these bouts were just games to her, playing at tactical leadership. But she had to admit they also bought out her competitive side.

She supposed it was a bit harsh of her to pulverise Cullen’s recruits just because she _still_ couldn’t beat him at chess.

“Yes, Inquisitor,” Noelle demurred, her cheeks growing warm as she refocused her efforts on her own behemoth just as three soldiers swarmed it.

But the fight ended far too quickly. Asha held out a little longer by summoning a circle of jagged earth similar to the red lyrium shards behemoths used, to hem their attackers in - “a bit uncalled for, wouldn’t you say, Inquisitor?!” “Bite me, Commander!” - but they barely held out five minutes. Asha supposed that, as Inquisitor, she should be proud that her army felled red templar creatures in record time. But mostly she was trying very hard not to blame Noelle.

The constructs and the shards of rock they’d summoned all disintegrated back to dirt as the soldiers dusted themselves down. Asha placed a hand to throbbing temples, grimacing. The heat and the long bouts of concentration of these spells used in quick succession left her feeling nauseous.

“How did we do, Inquisitor?” Dathen asked.

Asha stood there, uncertain of what to say. This had all been to help the soldiers train, and she guessed that neither Dathen or Noelle had actually even been here for that. There was only one reason mages their age volunteered for this kind of duty, and it was the same reason Ellana now trained with Sera in the valley, when the practice ground outside the Herald's Rest would do. She hadn’t thought _critique_ was expected.

“Errr…” she said, intelligently. _Maybe stop ogling the Commander when you think I don’t notice_ , was the only thing that immediately came to mind. Which was hardly constructive, if not actively hypocritical.

“You, Dathen, panic when you’re besieged on too many sides at once. Understandable, given that you’re not yourself a frontline combatant, but please try to remember that that behemoth is much bigger than you are. An easier target, but it can withstand far more force,” Cullen said as he appeared at her side, rescuing her from her own incompetence.

Dathen and Noelle looked surprised at his sudden arrival, but that quickly morphed into delight. Cullen was not, like many of the men, and some of the women, shirtless. That would be far too gauche, Asha figured (as she thanked and cursed the Creators in equal measure). But the heat meant he _was_ out of armour, in a thin white shirt unbuttoned at the collar and rolled up to the elbows.

And some trousers that she thought, personally, were just a little too tight.

His shirt was drenched with sweat and clung to him. In places. From exertion or fighting, or from the heat, she didn’t know. It shouldn’t have been sexy. When Asha was sweaty, overheated, and overworked - as she was right now, in fact - she wasn’t sexy. She was just a tomato with legs.

But of course, perfect, gorgeous Cullen Rutherford just glistened - like he was auditioning to be a new member of Isabela’s pirate crew, and had read the Captain’s very explicit instructions around work presentation. He looked gorgeous. Noelle and Dathen seemed to agree.

“And you, Noelle,” he continued, as the girl immediately began pinking up under his assessing gaze, “I know it isn’t actually relevant training that you’ll use in battle, but the harder you task my men, the harder they’ll fight. And the better they’ll be for it. Take it seriously, for their sake. And don’t be afraid to take risks.”

 _Please stop saying the word ‘harder’._ Asha silently begged, as the beginnings of a predatory look started to gleam in the girl’s eyes.

“Of course, Ser,” she said, in a very specifically pitched voice. Had Asha been feeling petty, she might have deemed it a purr.

“It’s - err - Commander, now, actually,” Cullen said, scratching his neck. “No Order titles for me.”

“I’m sorry,” Noelle gave him a smile that Asha tried not to be jealous of her possessing. She was very pretty - although, Asha couldn’t help but think, Ellana was prettier. “Old habits die hard. Does that mean you're free of... _all_ your vows, then?”

 _Ew ew ew ew_. Asha fought the urge to visibly grimace. She could not understand _how_ Circle mages found templars attractive. She was only going through this travesty of emotion because she got soft, well-spoken, tripping-over-himself-to-please Cullen. _She_ managed _him_. She’d never had to live in a tower with him watching over her like a creepy sanctioned voyeur, cradling her very life in his hands.

Although, she knew exactly what it was like when you grew up as part of a very tight knit group, seeing the same people you saw every single day, with hormones running rampant. As much as she hated to admit it, a handsome templar, in the dreary, monotonous life of a Circle tower…?

 _Fuck me,_ she thought, angrily. She could _not_ stomach the fact that she was _this far gone_.

“We lost because of her, you know,” she grumbled, when the two mages finally walked away. She didn’t miss the glance Noelle threw back over her shoulder like the lure on the end of a fishing line, although thankfully Cullen himself didn’t seem to notice - he was too preoccupied with soothing his Inquisitor's wounded ego.

“You’re just a sore loser,” he informed her with an amused twist of his mouth, passing over a canteen of water. “Shouldn’t you be somewhat glad that they took down three behemoths without breaking a sweat? Speaks of their stellar training, if I say so myself.”

“I’m telling you, she wasn’t paying attention. I’m not having her on my team again.”

“...We have teams?”

“You absolutely _know_ we have teams, you smug git.”

“Well, I suppose she’s a little flighty, but then, she _is_ Orlesian...”

Asha moved her staff to her other hand, and took an angry swig of the water. “It’s got nothing to do with how she _normally_ is. I'm sure she's a perfectly nice person, for an Orlesian. It's about how she was in the fight! Her and her friend were too busy eyeing you up the whole time to pay attention to the match.” She sighed, handed it back to him, “either she’s not on my team again or you… you conduct your side of the battle from behind a veil or a screen or something. Maybe you can wear a burlap sack. Not looking like-”

She began a gesture which encompassed all his unfairly beautiful-when-sweaty glory. By the time she’d finished flailing her arm at him and the gesture reached his face, he looked rather abashed.

“I… she…”

“Oh, come on! Every time you yelled a command, she practically quivered. And even if you didn't notice that... ‘Old habits die hard’?" Asha made quotation marks, "'Are you free of your vows'? _'Ser'?_ She was _flirting_.”

“...She said all of eight words to me, Inquisitor.”

“She is one of those blasted people who can make sure that eight words is _still_ flirting.” Asha hoped she sounded disgruntled over her defeat, not pathetically jealous. "...I suppose maybe that is just because she's Orlesian."

Cullen gave a baffled frown, then took a swig from the canteen. That startled Asha - she thought he’d bought it over for her, not that it was his and he was sharing it with her. _Do not_ , she thought, sternly, but her brain was already in overdrive about how something which had touched her lips had also touched _her_ lips…

Oh, her brain could just fucking can it. _You are_ not _some lust-drunk teen!_ She thought… with very little conviction.

“You look hot,” Cullen said suddenly, off-hand, and Asha nearly dropped her staff.

“I… what…?” _Oh Creators,_ she hastily thought, looking down at herself in her own (unsexy) sweat-drenched vest, and bare, freckled arms, wondering where the blush had started from _this time._ If she’d given herself away over a _fucking water canteen_ , she swore, by Fen’Heral’s blighted, fucking maw...

“That’s…! I mean…! I merely meant you look warm! Overheated!” Cullen now also looked mortified, as if he’d insulted her. “I wasn’t saying… You’ve been out in the sun all day. I thought you might have a headache. Do you need anything? I can get more water? Do you need a healer?”

“...Why would I need a healer?!”

“I - I _just thought you might!_ ”

Asha levelled a stare at him, and they lapsed into blissful (well, on Cullen's part slightly humiliated) silence.

“I’m fine,” she said finally, patting him on his shoulder before he had a heart attack. Then she almost had a heart attack, because his shirt was thin, and all she felt was the heat and firm swell of muscle under her hand. “Little headachey, nothing that some elfroot won’t cure. Anyway. Thank you for saving me from…”

“...From… having to give constructive criticism? Or from flirty Orlesians?”

“No flirty Orlesians for me, alas,” she grinned. “I don’t look half as good in my shirtsleeves.”

It was Cullen’s turn to look bemused then, and she hastily recovered the sentence as best she could. “But yes, the constructive criticism ...the whole 'being a leader' thing, I suppose.”

“You don’t need saving from being a leader,” he sighed, passing the canteen back to her, as if it was no big deal. “You’re a very good leader. Teaching people how to fight is my job, not yours.”

“I’d like to think I'd be able to bullshit your job, at least.” Asha teased, trying not to stare at said canteen, like a moron.

“Well, I suppose you could’ve told Noelle to stop being distracted, but if what you’re saying is true, then she would’ve just been embarrassed. It was actually the right call not to draw her up on it,” he said, reasonably. He smiled down at her in a way that turned her stomach molten. “Don’t get good at everything, Inquisitor, otherwise I won’t know what to do with myself.”

With her friends being sent out on missions she was no longer able to attend, not only was Asha housebound, but she had a lot more time on her hands. Most of this she dedicated to physical training, but she had another means of diverting all her restless attention: reading.

Asha now had a workable understanding of written Common. She kept up her lessons with Sarae, but independent study was becoming a lot easier. Despite certain foolhardy promises, she didn’t dive straight into Varric’s oeuvre - even though Cass’ blustered, defensive sales-pitch of _Swords and Shields_ was its focus on a buff warrior woman that... actually sounded _a lot like Cassandra_ (Asha added this to the burgeoning relationship conspiracy theory, and informed Cullen of it almost immediately).

Instead, she decided to use this newfound knowledge to catch up on the practice of… well… actually being a good Inquisitor.

She started with Leliana’s intelligence reports on the Templar Orders in the Free Marches. Although it was months out-of-date now - she even saw Reagan and Denam’s names mentioned - it was still useful to try and decipher the Nightingale's awful handwriting, and the exercise took her several weeks. Then, she asked Josephine for the back catalogue of meeting notes, and endeavoured to read through them all before Halamshiral, so that if people asked her about her organisation - which she supposed they would, given that she was its leader - she might be able to conjure a useful response.

It did not occur to her, until she had all the boxes of records delivered to Solas’ desk, and her friend raised an unimpressed eyebrow at her from across the table, that maybe starting with a trashy romance serial would’ve been the easiest of the two options.

It’ll be good practice, she told herself, looking at the stupidly difficult task she’d set herself. Although she couldn’t understand Orlesian, she could speak Navarran. Both used Common runic script, and there was enough overlap between the two languages to make sense of some of the documents she might rifle through in the Winter Palace, when she was in places she shouldn’t be. Besides, apparently Vivienne’s replacement at Celene’s right hand was from Ferelden, and if the fight against Corypheus had taught her anything so far, it was to not trust sketchy wizard types.

Josie’s writing was adorably neat, and it was nice to see behind her habitual clipboard for once. But damn, some of these meetings were _dry_. As Asha spent several days working through them, she began to remember why she’d avoided the war room at all costs, back when they were in Haven. It only really got interesting - if Asha did say so herself - after she got made Inquisitor. She decided to prioritise the notes for meetings she’d missed while away from Skyhold on missions.

She was halfway through the minutes taken while she was wiling away her time in Crestwood, dealing with the Abomination of Kirkwall and a not-breakup, when she noticed the first thing that made her pause:

_"Issue of Inquisitor’s quarters: all agreed that Inquisitor cannot stay in dorms - lack of professionalism, strong likelihood of assassination, etc. JM has audited available rooms in Skyhold & proposes annexe above throne room. CR notes isolation a problem for Inquisitor. L says this is best for security - balcony (ie. drop below) particularly useful when dealing with potential assailants._

_JM asks for ideas regarding Inquisitor’s comfort. L suggests clothes - Inquisitor’s wardrobe already an issue. CR notes desire for shared accommodation indicator of Dalish upbringing - can this be accommodated some other way? JM’s research on Lavellan heraldry - potential for decoration? All in support of this suggestion. CR asks why this cannot be extended to Skyhold on the whole. Action: JM to consult with steward."_

It was an inconsequential conversation hidden away in the closing remarks, after all the serious discussion regarding Hawke and demon army leads. But it made Asha sit up straight from her bored slump in her chair, earning a curious look from Solas from where he stood painting the wall off to the right.

 _Cullen_ had been the one to suggest Dalish banners of remembrance? She smiled every time she saw them on the castle walls, these days.

She wondered if her cheeks were burning.

Predictably, and feeling like a little girl with her first crush, she began skimming the meeting notes... solely to see what Cullen had said about her. Unfortunately, because Cullen was a consummate professional, who presumably did not spend every hour of his day obsessing over her the way she currently did him, this offered very little content. In fact, it wasn’t until she gave up and started idly flicking through the reports covering the time of Adamant, when Leliana and Josephine were alone in Skyhold, that she noticed anything:

 _"Note on progress received from CR in Exalted Plains - army likely 8 days from Skyhold. New asset acquired for Inquisition: please consult addendum 6.1: ‘Ellana Lavellan’. Action: JM to add EL to payroll. JM believes welcome party absolutely essential!!!_ (that part was underlined three times.) _L states that victory feast already organised and will double as celebration, because L is allergic to sentiment, and fun."_ (There was actually a little doodle of an angry face after that sentence. Josie’s note taking had become a lot more informal during Cullen and Cassandra’s extended period of absence - it was obvious that she and the Nightingale were old friends.)

_"Postscript: CR requests that Inquisitor receive both coffee and chocolate on her return to Skyhold. Coffee order already scheduled, arriving 3 days time. Action: JM will purchase chocolate. L: Inquisitor typically ate milk/white chocolate in Orlais, according to scouts - JM will avoid dark."_

Asha didn’t remember requesting coffee or chocolate while in the Exalted Plains. But she did remember complaining... _a lot_. And she also remembered the box of chocolates Josie handed to her upon arrival into Skyhold, which Ellana had cited as _clear_ evidence that the Ambassador was romantically interested in her.

Of course, Asha’s newly addled brain decided to interpret this as: Cullen had got her those chocolates.

By proxy.

He had, at least, stored away information from one of her many whinging conversations, and felt the need to include it in official Inquisition correspondence.

 _Don’t be an idiot!_ she chastised herself, wringing both hands through her hair and shaking her head like she could clear it of any and all delusions. Probably, what had happened was: she annoyed Cullen to breaking point by behaving like a spoiled brat in the Plains, he asked Josie and Leliana for anything that would get her out of his hair once they were back at Skyhold. That it was such an impractical solution only proved how infuriating and immature she’d been, when travelling cross-country.

Still… to do such a thing, well... it was actually… very… _kind_...

But then, he was always very kind. And sweet. And absurdly concerned about her wellbeing.

Her heart flipped in her chest.

Asha let out a long, long groan and collapsed in her chair, almost thwacking her forehead on the table, as she was finally forced to acknowledge what she’d been holding at bay for weeks: she didn’t just want to jump Cullen Rutherford’s bones. What she was feeling wasn’t just a passing - and entirely understandable - infatuation focused mainly around his biceps, and/or shoulders.

She liked him. Properly. As a person. As a friend. Possibly… even as an ex-templar.

 _I am so very, very fucked,_ she thought dejectedly, wishing she wasn’t in a library so she could wail aloud.

“You look like you’re regretting learning Common,” came a wry voice from outside her line of vision, and this time she did shriek as, almost as if conjured by her awful, crushing realisation, she looked up to see the Commander himself approaching her. A quick glance around showed that the library was now enveloped in a golden dusk glow. She’d been wrapped up in these notes, seeking out Cullen’s name, and finding out far too much about the statistical provisions for Skyhold’s troops as her paltry reward, for hours. She'd been so thoroughly absorbed in this _very professional task_ , that Solas had even vacated the rotunda without her noticing.

...She’d only just realised she liked him… _now?_

Cullen had a cup of tea in one hand, and a bowl of something steaming in the other. When he got close she saw it was some kind of dessert with custard - very much not something he’d ever eat. Her suspicions were confirmed when he set both down in front of her.

Asha's stomach grumbled, at the same moment her heart clenched. She’d been working at these notes - with diligent focus on her 'official Inquisition business' that fell just short of... she didn't know, doodling their initials in hearts in the margins - straight through dinner. And here Cullen was, noticing her absence. Bringing her food.

“Oh,” she said, silently willing herself not to panic, “what you’re actually seeing is the face of someone who has realised that she’s becoming you. Drowning in paperwork, missing meals… I never miss meals, Cullen.”

“It’s a slippery slope, I’ll admit,” he agreed with mock solemnity, “warn me when you begin enjoying statistics - I will notify a healer.”

“You enjoy statistics? Creators. Corypheus should just kill me now.”

“I’ll pretend that isn’t a _direct_ insult, Inquisitor.”

“No, that’s not what I meant!” she said urgently, then hastily tried to recover another quip. “I’m very impressed and thankful for your skill, Commander. Particularly if it means, you know, that _I_ don’t have to enjoy statistics. You can take that one for the team. It can be your calling, even. Your vocation. The Herald of Andraste bids you make it so.”

“I shall, of course, follow the Divine Wisdom of the Herald of Andraste, to my dying day,” he said, with a small, crooked grin that made her stomach flutter.

“Oh, fuck off,” she grumbled, looking down at the dessert he’d brought her, and then back up at him. He still hadn’t taken a seat, but was just hovering by the side of her desk. “Is there anything you needed me for, in particular?”

“Oh... no, actually.” He scratched the back of his neck, “I was just passing through and. Well. Cassandra mentioned you weren’t at dinner. They had _tarte tatin_ \- I believe that’s your favourite?”

How in Elgar’nan’s name did he know that? “I can confirm that pastries are the only good thing to come out of Orlais, yes,” she replied, in an even tone.

“Well then, I’m glad you don’t have to miss out,” he said, looking pleased. “Let me know if you, um, need any help with anything. I’m just…” he pointed to the door leading out towards his office, awkwardly, “...across the way.”

As her eyes followed his retreating back, she fought a smile. Gods, he was adorable.

 _No, he’s not!_ She reprimanded herself. He was _her colleague_ , who had done something nice, because he was an enabling workaholic. He had no clue that she lov-

 _Loved being given free food._ Her brain hastily veered off course, completing that particular sentence in a safe, satisfactory manner.

Asha waited until he left, and then lay her head back down on the desk, and tried very hard not to think. It took her a long time to eat the food he’d brought her. Her stomach wouldn’t stop churning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All things Asha missed when trawling war room notes, or wrote off as 'professional concern': Cullen asking for updates on her progress when travelling, Cullen prompting assessments of her fighting ability from Cassandra, Cullen agreeing to too many relief missions, Cullen raising the budget for her Halamshiral outfits... etc.
> 
> This was a silly, self-indulgent chapter, but I hope you enjoyed it. Don't know what it says about me that 'self-indulgent' covers both OTP interactions _and_ extensive 'reasons you suck speeches' levelled at my own protagonist by bitchy Knight Enchanters, but there you go!
> 
> I hope you don't hate Vivienne too much for how she behaves in this chapter, I personally think she's levelling quite a legitimate criticism against Asha in this moment, which is: you are pretty fucking unprepared for the Winter Palace.
> 
> Which is exciting, given that in next week's chapter we officially make it to Halamshiral! I'm so excited, I had a lot of fun writing an absurdly long masquerade ball sequence and I cannot wait to share it with you! :) x


	64. Chapter Sixty-Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts, part 1

And so, with that new revelation alight and about as stable as a vault of _gaatlok_ in her mind... 

Asha did nothing. 

And two weeks later, the Inquisition departed for Halamshiral.

“I’ve heard Sebastian Vael is going to be attending,” Asha said, as they mounted up into the carriage that would take them the final step of the journey to their residences at the edge of the palace grounds. They’d left their own horses watered and stabled in the city itself. Apparently, if you were a guest and arrived at the Winter Palace mounted on a horse, it signalled martial intent. Hopefully, their assassin would do that out of a sense of propriety, and they’d catch the culprit before the ball even started. “Odds on a proposal within the week?” 

“For you or for me?” El asked, “because you literally colluded with the Abomination of Kirkwall, his sworn enemy. I know that one dress of yours is very low cut, but it’s not _that_ low cut.”

“For you, obviously! _I’m_ not interested. You were the one who dedicated yourself to the cause at sixteen.”

“Then the odds are fifty-fifty,” Ellana said. She gave a wolfish smile, “depending on whether or not _I_ like _him_.”

“Well, Sid said he’s a wanker,” Asha confided. “Apparently he’s only here to get the nobility to pledge troops to protect the Chantry in Val Royeaux and replace the templars they lost. Have you met him, Cass?”

“A few times,” the Seeker admitted, climbing up into the carriage after them and shutting the door. “We only spoke on Chantry matters. He remains very… pious, even though he chose to forsake his vows, in the end. Varric spent far more time with him than I ever did. I gather he is… not a fan.”

“Yes, yes, but is he as handsome as they say?” El sighed wistfully. “I will take either you or Varric’s verdict on the matter.”

Cassandra gave a small smile. “Very. I do not wonder how his belief in the Maker is so certain: only divine intervention could produce such eyes. And hands.”

“Oh my gods,” Asha waggled her eyebrows at Ellana. For all her friend’s love of smutty literature, she’d never heard Cassandra say anything even remotely salacious. They both collapsed into giggles while Cassandra tried not to blush.

“Ok, ok,” Ellana said, wheezing, “so: on the pretty Chantry boy spectrum, is he hotter than Cullen?”

Asha took some time smoothing out the creases of her ridiculous uniform, while Cassandra frowned, “I am… not the best judge of such things. Cullen is one of my closest friends.”

Asha snorted. Both women’s gazes immediately snapped to her. 

She started guiltily and said, “sorry. It’s just. If he’s your friend. Then you have _seen him_.” 

“I obviously know Cullen is handsome,” Cassandra replied, “but I know him too well for it to bother me. We are too alike. And it’s not like I’d ever fantasise about him. Imagine how awkward that would be.”

As Ellana started saying, “so, does that mean you fantasise about _Vael_...?” Asha busied herself with looking out of the carriage window.

Now that she was facing up to the fact that her Cullen-related emotions were likely to be taking up permanent residence, she was glad she’d dedicated so much time becoming outwardly immune to them. It was an unexpected side benefit of Vivienne’s Orlesian etiquette training: the ruse actually seemed to be working.

So she liked Cullen more than just to look at. So what? She didn’t know if she could handle a relationship right now. Whether she actually _wanted one_. Particularly one with an ex-templar. Presuming the ex-templar was also interested, which was another round of abysmally depressing uncertainty, particularly after tripping over the mangled, crossed-wires of her time with Solas. 

Maybe... if the feelings were still there in two years... or however long it was going to take them to defeat Corypheus… maybe _then_ she’d ask him on a date. 

She certainly wasn’t going to do anything about it _now._ They had only one shot to foil this step in Corypheus’ plan. Whatever… whatever was going to happen, whatever she was going to do, she couldn’t do it _now_. Halamshiral was too important.

 _The ball is too important,_ she told herself two days later, heart in her throat, as she and Josephine approached the Winter Palace’s illuminated facade, the fate of an Empire looming behind them. She tried to remind herself that this was a matter of life and death.

But all she could really think about was what Cullen would think of her, in this dress.

It was her dress for debuting in front of the Empress, which meant it was… a little absurd, in all the most Orlesian ways. It was black to match the Inquisition’s official uniform, the skirt threaded through with hidden veins of deep crimson that caught the light in flashes like strong wine. The sleeves were off the shoulder, the corset was high backed and offensively tight, and the skirt flared out around her like petals of a flower. And over the centre of the bodice, large and sparkly and oversized, was the Inquisition symbol, embroidered in silver and outlined in scarlet. Asha wasn’t entirely sure why it was there. Helpfully branding her, in case someone wondered why a Dalish elf had somehow wandered in off the street, tripped and fallen into Gaspard de Chalons’ company?

But ridiculousness aside, it did look… pretty fucking amazing.

Her face, in comparison, was made up in such a way to made it look bare. Although she was smothered under an inch of powder, the only noticeably strong colour was a smudge of crimson on her lips and cheeks. That decision had been made to prove a point, for the same reason she didn’t wear a mask. She was the Herald of Andraste - everyone here was lucky to catch a glimpse of her face, which needed no adornment. A direct contradiction to the intense dress - and she supposed, technically, to her vallaslin - but… well, they were in Orlais. 

“You’ll be perfect!” Josephine said in her ear. Lady Montilyet's voice was high and taut with nerves. Asha gave a small nod as she watched a shorter figure part the crowds outside the palace, making a beeline towards her. The way eyes followed him, and the people who subtly but immediately moved out of his path, announced that this was Gaspard, hidden behind a grotesque, gold mask.

She walked forward to close the gap, and then executed the fucking Gaspard de Chalons curtsy. She was a little mad that Vivienne was already inside the palace: it was fucking _perfect_. Three days, and one of the most humiliating dressing downs of Asha’s life, dedicated to less than two seconds of this entire affair.

“Inquisitor Lavellan,” the man said, sketching her an inconsequential bow in return that the new, etiquette drilled part of her _knew_ was incorrect. “I have long awaited our meeting. The rumours about you were so intriguing. I hear you defeated an army of demons at the Western Approach, when their forces outnumbered you three to one. You have walked in the Fade twice over. Imagine what you could accomplish, with the full support of the Rightful Emperor of Orlais.”

 _Imagine what I could accomplish right now, if I had my full lung capacity._ Asha thought, but didn’t make the joke. Jokes that were actually funny had been vetoed outright by Vivienne. 

“And which one _was_ the rightful one, again?” she asked instead, “I keep getting them confused.”

“The handsome, charming one of course, my lady,” he replied. Asha fought not to roll her eyes, and gave him her version of Vivienne’s beatific, barely-there smile instead. He offered his arm.

She looked at it, feeling her gorge rise in her throat. She thought of Ellana’s tales of surviving in the war-ravaged remains of the Exalted Plains. She remembered the moment when Vivienne explained that chevaliers such as Gaspard habitually hunted elves for sport.

She extended her ungloved, anchored hand, and entered the Winter Palace.

“A Dalish savage, whose magic was so dangerous and out-of-control she was made tranquil? This must be his idea of a joke.”

“I heard Madame Vivienne trained her - the Lady of Iron must be desperate, or in serious need of diversion, in her old age. It’s like teaching a bear to dance: amusing, but ultimately one can never ignore what you’ve put in a pretty dress,” came another whisper from the balcony above, as Gaspard deposited Asha at the top of the stairs down into the presentation hall. She thought she saw him raise an eyebrow at her behind the mask, as if waiting for her to rise to the bait. 

Her commentators were speaking Common, after all - they wanted her to hear the insults.

“After you, monsieur,” she said, with an unruffled gesture to the steps down. She made her voice magnanimous with an edge of sarcasm, as if there was ever a version of events where she would be expected to greet the Empress before her own cousin. Gaspard smiled, like her remark pleased him, and then descended the stairs.

It was only then that, fucking terrified, Asha risked a glance behind her. She was relieved to find the Inquisition had amassed silently at her back. She’d been so busy trying to not fuck up her conversation with Gaspard about elven unrest that she hadn’t dared break eye contact, and had just blindly let him and his thinly veiled racism lead her into the ballroom. Ellana was there, in her own dress, which was deep red with an outer gown of translucent black lace. They mouthed, “you look gorgeous!” at each other at the same time, as Asha’s eyes cautiously passed over the party. Everyone else was in uniform, apart from Madame de Fer, who wore her own colours and headdress, but with a large Inquisition broach, securing her own half-cape to her back. 

Asha eyes rested on Cullen for a few seconds, renewing her mental pictures of other half-cape related matters. His eyes were riveted on her as well. He was in charge of her safety, so it probably was just dedication to the cause, but Asha couldn’t help but smugly remind herself that this dress was _very_ pretty. 

Smile a little more sincere now, Asha turned back to face forward, just in time to hear the announcement: “And now, presenting: Grand Duke Gaspard de Chalons.”

Asha remembered what Vivienne had said - ‘count to ‘seven paralysis glyphs’, and _then_ move’ - which meant she only barely heard her own title, “and accompanying him, Lady Inquisitor Ashatarsylnin Lavellan, Blessed Herald of Andraste, Redeemed Only By Her Grace. Vanquisher of the Rebel Mages of Ferelden, Crusher of the Vile Apostates of the Mage Underground, Reclaimer of the Adamant Fortress.”

 _Seven Paralysis glyphs!_ Asha lifted her skirt with one hand, extended her other hand palm up so that the anchor flashed and pulsed for all to see, and then started walking down the stairs.

There was a litany of titles that followed, most of which were lost on her in her dogged attempts not to trip. Only the advisers were allowed to be formally presented, otherwise she’d literally be dragging half the ballroom with her across the dance floor. “Ser Cullen Stanton Rutherford of Honnleath, Commander of the Forces of the Inquisition, Former Knight-Commander of Kirkwall,” the palace herald continued. “Lady Leliana Amell, Nightingale of the Imperial Court, Veteran of the Fifth Blight. Seneschal of the Inquisition, and Left Hand of the Divine.”

Asha _did_ almost trip, then. She thought she heard certain people falter behind her as well. Leliana… _Amell?!_ Did that mean... that she and the Hero of Ferelden…?

Asha came to a stop at the platform in front of Celene, and heard the advisors halt behind her. There was an angry, terse curse from the Nightingale, under her breath, “ _Morrigan_.”

As she kept walking, Asha heard the announcement continue, “and, attending under the banner of the Inquisition, Lady Sidonie Leandra Hawke, Champion of Kirkwall, Vanquisher of the Displaced Arishok, Heir of the Amell line. And, um, Captain Isabela Hawke, of the... trading vessel, the Siren’s Call.”

… _Hawke_ was here? In her quick glance back, Asha hadn’t noticed the Champion amongst the black-clothed Inquisition uniforms …Wasn’t she supposed to be at Weisshaupt?

She'd reached a point where she couldn’t afford to look back. Empress Celene looked down from on high, golden mantel and gem-encrusted mask haloing her in glimmering wealth. She wore deep, royal blue - Asha was a little annoyed by that, actually, because only the Empress was allowed to wear blue in the Imperial Court, and that was frankly Asha’s best colour. Still, there was no denying the woman was impressive, even if her voice was annoyingly insipid and words deliberately obtuse. Her companion, the Duchess of Lydes, was rocking an excellent undercut, and had a lovely jawline. Asha exchanged meaningless, inane pleasantries with them that Vivienne had practically scripted for her, curtsied low, and left via the left-hand stair with Leliana, Josie and Cullen all at her back.

“ _Fenedhis_ ,” she whispered, running shaky hands down her skirts and trying to make it look like she was rearranging them. She looked up at the three of them, “was that ok? Did the curtsy work? Oh my gods, do I have something on my face?”

She looked down at her tits, having the wild thought they might have spilled out of the front of her dress. That was a constant fear that tormented her, these days, after the beige dress incident. But of course, her properly fitted corset made her already flat chest flatter, so everything was fine.

“You’re fine, Inquisitor,” Leliana said, although her eyes were on the crowd, mind clearly elsewhere.

“You were perfect!” Josie said, much more enthusiastically, clasping Asha’s hands, “you look so very lovely - doesn’t she look lovely?”

“Of course she does,” Cullen said. As Asha began to feel a pleasant shiver down her spine, he said, with an amused smile as if he was letting her in on a joke, “that dress was worth half our activity in the Western Approach.”

She smiled back, though it felt Orlesian-brittle. Her fluttering stomach turned rock solid as she remembered the dismal tone in which he always discussed Halamshiral expenses.

“Well my goodness, just imagine what could've been done with the other half,” came an arch voice from their side, as Sidonie walked up the stairs with Isabela at her side. Asha was surprised to see them both were also wearing Inquisition uniforms. Sidonie had her black hair in a long, elaborate and many stranded plait down to the small of her back, while Isbaela had most of her tunic buttons undone, and was certainly using the ridiculous boots to her advantage. “Inquisitor,” Sid continued, darting in to kiss her on the cheek, “you look well.”

“ _Very_ well,” Isabela grinned, leaning in and kissing Asha’s other cheek while she blinked and blushed. 

“I - um - that is - hello,” said Asha, intelligently. She was actually thrilled to find out that she wasn’t so lost to the Cullen-related debacle that being surrounded by pretty women complimenting her appearance left her unmoved. “Aren’t you supposed to be… um, somewhere?”

“In the Nocen Sea?” Isabela offered, eyebrow raised.

“And miss all my favourite people, here, in one place?” said Sidonie, fluttering her eyelashes at Cullen while he rolled his eyes. “Why, I’d have come all the way here for these boots alone! Never mind the chance to watch old Andraste-crotch confront the fact that his sparkly new Chantry saint was _actively fucked over by the Chantry_. I want the two of us to have front row seats, when his brain implodes under the strain of trying to acknowledge that the Maker is fallible.” 

“...Um?”

“That’s Sebastian,” Isabela explained. “There were many things I appreciated about his whole… aesthetic, but bizarrely, the crotch was not one of them.”

“It always felt like our Gracious Lady of the Belt Buckle was judging me, alongside that sanctimonious bastard.”

Asha tried to bring the conversation back to something resembling a topic. “So... um, why aren’t you in the Nocen Sea?” 

“Oh, well,” Sidonie leant far in, and murmured in her ear, so close that her breath tickled Asha’s neck, “it seems like someone has already arrived at Weisshaupt in my place. He was thoroughly _livid_ about where the Fade spat him out, to be honest, but it seems like Justice… has yet to be done. I find the whole thing rather hilarious. Once a Grey Warden, always a Grey Warden, apparently. Man couldn’t escape it even if he tried. Multiple times."

“You see, Commander, Sid’s just explaining how we stopped dutifully bitching out all the Wardens of Thedas, just for the chance of some delicious views of our Lady Inquisitor’s decolletage,” Isabela was saying, in an obnoxiously loud voice that turned the heads of a few nobles nearby. It wouldn’t be enough of a distraction to fool Leliana - but then, Leliana already seemed rather distracted. “I’ve been hearing such good things from Varric and charming little Ellie about tomorrow’s outfit - are there good things?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Isabela,” Cullen replied, in an already-tired voice.

“My, I bet it is! If you could just be party to half of the images in my head, Commander! I have to say, you’re also looking _very_ dapper in your cute little cape. Doesn’t he just look lovely, Inquisitor?”

Sidonie had leaned back at this point, and Asha was a little distracted, ecstatic to hear that Anders had survived. She just automatically echoed his own previous response, with a lot more enthusiasm. “Yes, _of course he does._ ”

Isabela looked delighted, and Cullen blinked a few times, and Asha regretted her life choices. “Well, things are brewing nicely,” the Captain said, clapping her hands and rubbing them together, “where’s the alcohol in this shindig? That’ll definitely help everything along-”

“Inquisitor,” Leliana interrupted tersely, grabbing Asha’s arm and pulling her to a corner, “ _a word_.”

“Well, well, well, what have we here?” said a rich voice that Asha could imagine having some _very_ conflicted feelings about, as she turned to be greeted its owner, “the leader of the new Inquisition, fabled Herald of the Faith. Delivered from the grasp of the Fade and the throes of tranquillity, by the hand of Blessed Andraste herself.”

Looking at all the plush velvet, dark hair, and porcelain skin, Asha tried to pin on her best ‘I didn’t fade-step into your office, rummage around, and find your secret room’ face. The woman in front of her perfectly matched Leliana’s description of Morrigan, the mage who had apparently divulged the Nightingale’s marital status to Empress Celene. Asha hoped her skirt pockets weren’t noticeably jangling with caprice coins. 

_"As if any girl in a tight-enough corset wouldn’t immediately have you begging out of the palm of her hand."_ Ellana’s voice echoed in Asha’s head and, looking at Morrigan in all that plum-dark velvet, she couldn’t help but think: _...fair_.

Maybe she could still fall in love with a shady, charlatan apostate who had excellent taste in lipstick? That seemed to make more sense than a templar did. They’d have way more to talk about.

… _Fall in love with??!_ Asha steeled herself - she _refused_ to believe she was that far gone.

“What brings such an exalted creature here to the Imperial Court, I wonder? Do you even know?”

“It’s funny you should use the word ‘exalted’,” Asha replied. “I’m here because Gaspard invited me after my _excellent_ relief work in his territories. Nothing more.”

“Indeed.” Morrigan said, obviously unconvinced, “and how does it feel to serve a man who slaughters your people for sport?”

“About the same as serving the prophet of a religion that hates everything about me,” Asha said, “it becomes rather… simplistic, to think I serve them at all.”

Morrigan let out a delighted chuckle. “Goodness me, this will make for a fun conversation, I can tell. You might want to throw in a few more euphemisms when discussing sedition, my dear, but otherwise you should do quite well in your time at court.”

“You honour me with such praise, Lady Morrigan.”

“Ahh, you see - almost perfect, but not quite,” Morrgian tutted, “you have my name, ‘tis true, but I am no lady. Such pleasant titles are quite wasted on me, and I have not the mind to demand nor invent them.”

Asha thought of _Madame de Fer_ , the woman Morrigan had supplanted, and fought to keep a smile off of her face. She really hoped Morrigan wasn’t here to kill Celene. She already liked her way too much. 

The woman led her forward, back towards the presentation hall as the second bell tolled. “You have been very… busy this evening, hunting in every dark corner of the palace.”

 _Fenedhis_. “Well,” Asha said, carefully, “I feel like I am unlikely to be invited here again, so I’m just taking in the sights. We can’t _all_ be arcane advisors.”

“Or be privileged enough to have our touch of the Fade considered the product of divine intervention,” Morrigan said with a smirk, “perhaps you and I hunt the same prey.”

 _Fancy a mage uprising?_ Asha fought the urge to make the joke, thought it was tempting. Luckily, she maintained an outwardly sensible demeanour until the woman had handed over a key to the servants’ quarters.

“What comes next will be most exciting,” Morrigan said with an enigmatic smile. “And now, Ashatarsylnin, indulge me in answering a question that needs not quite as much pontificating.”

“Yes, that colour really does suit you, and no, I wouldn’t quite say we match,” Asha replied quickly, startling the other mage into a laugh. 

“Goodness, bold _and_ foolish, like so many heroes before you. No wonder the Nightingale likes you so very much,” she said. “But no, my question is far less harmless, and far more important. Tell me: what was it like, being tranquil?”

Asha faltered, surprised to be asked such a thing so bluntly, in Orlais, of all palces. But Morrigan was a mage herself - an apostate - and, well, there didn’t seem to be much wrong with humouring her.

“Like screaming behind a hollow mask,” Asha replied, honestly. “It was great practice for my lessons in Orlesian etiquette.”

Speaking with Morrigan proved relatively painless, but Asha should’ve known it was downhill from there.

A sharp look from Leliana told her that espionage was at an end for tonight - she’d been gone from the ballroom long enough for her absence to be noted, and lots of people massed around her once Morrigan left, clearly wanting say they’d at least had the chance to meet the Herald of Andraste. She had groups of nobles coming up to her in their faceless masks, reaching out to touch her hand without her permission while insulting her to her face and believing the insults too elaborate for her to notice. One man even tried to lean in and touch her ears, wondering out loud how a rabbit could be the Champion of the Faith. She only just managed to dodge out of his way.

She felt like a curiosity in a collectors’ cabinet, to be scrutinised and cooed over. But she wasn’t the only one.

“You have such beautiful hair, Ser Rutherford.”

“Smile, Commander! You’re so handsome when you smile!”

“He’s just as handsome when he doesn’t!”

“Do you enjoy music?”

“Has anyone told you you have remarkable eyes?”

Asha had predicted that Cullen would be popular, she just hadn’t quite anticipated... _how_ popular. A couple of flirtatious Circle mages or hordes of teenagers at the military training ground were nothing in comparison to the mass of admirers that now followed him everywhere he went. She found it funny for all of thirty seconds, before she became annoyed, and then mostly just worried. Bless him, he just looked so overwhelmed.

She’d just finished a pleasant conversation (for Orlais) with Lady Mantillon when she heard… well, the closest thing to a yelp she could ever imagine from her Commander. She glanced over her shoulder to see him looking scandalised at a short man next to him. “Did you just… grab my bottom?” he all-but-squeaked.

“...I’m a weak man.”

 _It’s not funny,_ Asha thought, lips twitching as she fought a snigger. And it wasn’t. Although with that reaction, Cullen was starting to sound more and more like a dowager aunt every day.

Still, that was enough to make her think he probably deserved a reprieve. She bid adieu to Lady Mantillion, to sidle up behind the bottom-touching culprit.

Then she swatted the nobleman on the ass, so hard that her anchored hand sparked on contact.

The man made his own scandalised noise, and spun around to see who had assaulted him in turn, “what do you think you’re doing?!”

Cullen was also looking at her, wide-eyed. Asha raised her hand to examine the anchor - proclaiming the sanctuary of her higher, divine status - and started speaking louder, over the crowd, “Goodness! I’m so sorry! Honestly, sometimes this thing has a mind of its own! I know my hand is blessed by Andraste, but she was clearly far more horny than the Chantry could ever have credited! Truly, I suppose it’s unfair to expect _more decorum_ from her followers and blessed children, when she clearly cannot keep her own hands to herself.”

The man was slowly turning more beetroot behind his gilded porcelain, so Asha just magnified the gleam of her smile as she fully pushed past him, to grab Cullen’s wrist, “Commander Rutherford, may I have a word?”

“Maker’s breath, _yes_ ,” he muttered, as he gratefully allowed himself to be pulled out of the fray. 

Free from his newfound aura of sex-crazed nobility, Asha watched in amusement as the tension deflated from his shoulders. “The dangers of half-capes in public are manifold, it seems,” she said, dryly, squeezing his arm before letting go, once they’d made it away from the crowds.

“Hilarious, Inquisitor.”

“I try,” she told him with a sunny smile. She leant her elbows on the balcony railing and glanced down to watch the ballroom below. When Cullen joined her, she gave his posture a side-long glance. “Are you sure you dare leave yourself exposed to another assault? …Maybe you should put your back to a wall?”

“You’re enjoying this far too much,” he sighed, though he was smiling almost despite himself. “So, what did you need to talk about?”

“Oh,” she said as she watched the dancers below. She saw that Isabela was swinging Ellana round the dancefloor, and that the outcome was far better than that sentence would ever suggest. “Nothing really. I just figured you needed rescuing. We can stand here for a bit, and I’ll just shout some random elvish phrases, maybe shake my anchor a little, to keep them off you.”

“Ah. Thank you,” he said. “But you’re not - uh - having similar issues, are you?”

“What issues? I’ve got… racist courtiers? Cryptic arcane advisors? The logistics of fade-stepping into a location you’ve never seen before? In a dress?”

“The - uh - admirers… when you look like...” he gestured to her dress, then promptly closed his mouth, “never mind. Of course you have bigger problems.”

“I think I’m a bit too knife-ear-y for that,” she pointed out. “If I’m going to be propositioned by anyone at any point this week, it won’t be in public, where people can accuse them of a rabbit fetish. Well, unless the person in question is Isabela, I suppose. Then she’d probably just lean into it and purchase a set of novelty ears.” A quick glance behind her and she saw that the group were all staring daggers at her back, while simultaneously inching in closer. “Mythal’s tits, they don’t give up, do they? Is this better or worse than demons?”

“Infinitely worse. I find demons will at least take no for an answer, even if it means they try to eat you afterwards.”

“Yes, they do seem to place a lot of value on consent.” She grinned at his dire tone, reaching over to pat his arm, “don’t worry, Commander, I’ll protect your virtue. Maybe we can ask Solas if you can borrow his stupid hat to dampen everything down a bit. Ward off the hordes.”

“...You also think it’s stupid?”

Asha laughed. They fell silent for a few moments as the music washed over them, the current song coming to a close. Ellana swapped places with Hawke, and Dorian offered to take her out on the floor. He no doubt wanted to scandalise the Orlesian nobility by being the only person from a country more racist than them, and still choosing to dance with an elf.

Another look behind her, to see the nobles were still circling from a distance, like vultures. “I don’t suppose you’d dance with me?” Asha asked, trying to think of ways to escape them all.

“No. Thank you.” 

“Oh.” The rudeness of his response made her freeze. She hadn’t made the offer out of any romantic aspirations, but it was hard not to fight the sting of rejection. “...And I was going to promise not to flash you this time, and everything.”

Cullen suddenly startled out of whatever middle distance he was staring at, seemingly horrified with himself. “No - I didn’t mean to… Maker’s Breath. I’ve answered that question so many times already that I’m now just rejecting it automatically.”

The immediate relief made Asha giggle a little wildly. “Goodness! The sufferings of Ser Cullen Stanton Rutherford are plentiful, and many. Truly, my heart bleeds. Too many people asking you to dance, looking _too_ good in your fancy cape, your hair coming out _too_ perfectly every single morning. Every day must contain untold struggle. Tell me, how can you even bear to go on?"

"Ha ha."

"...Should we set up some kind of charity fund for your cause?"

“Alright, Inquisitor, you’ve made your point,” he grumbled.

She grinned. “The offer of that dance still stands. If I get my gross elfy hands all over you in public, maybe they’ll leave you alone.”

Cullen tensed up next to her, and Asha also took a moment to steel herself against her own catastrophic wording. After a pause, he said, “No... thank you, Inquisitor. Though I suppose I appreciate the strategy, and the sentiment.”

 _He’d rather weather this, than dance with me_ , Asha thought. “We could always ask Ellana to lend aid to the Cause?” she said, looking down at her hands. He probably wanted to dance with her sister more anyway. 

She watched as Dorian told Ellana a joke, and El let out a peel of laughter, glowing and almost radiant in her delight. On the dance floor, right under Cullen’s nose.

“No, it’s more just that I am not one for dancing, particularly as a defensive manoeuvre,” Asha looked up, and saw that Cullen wasn’t even watching the floor below. Instead, he was turned to examine her. Asha turned to face him too, mirroring his posture. She was a little confused, but guessed that this was the moment where her awkward almost-flirting caused him to flee for the hills. She glanced up at him, in his stupid sexy outfit, and prepared to also bow out gracefully, as if none of this affected her.

“I’ve found,” Cullen said, something akin to resolve settling in his face. His eyes were warm and dark in the dim lighting of the room, like the copper embers of a dying fire. “That a direct approach always works better.”

And then he bowed to her, reached out, and kissed the back of her anchored hand, like a hero from a storybook.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's Halamshiral time, so get ready for some obnoxiously, indulgently long chapters!!
> 
> Author's note: the thing about Chevaliers hunting elves for sport is a canon detail taken from _The Masked Empire_. I haven't read it, but I might as well have for the amount of research I did on Orlesian politics trying to work out how the fuck Asha would interact with people at the masked ball. 
> 
> I always get so stressed out by the Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts quest - I genuinely didn't have a full picture of the narrative until I googled it for this fic. I've always been so intensely anxious, with a walkthrough on my phone in my lap, desperately trying to tackle those damned timed sections, that I'm kind of blind to everything else that's happening other than the balcony dance scene! This whole fic came about bc I wanted to replay without having to suffer through this mission :')
> 
> See you tomorrow xx


	65. Chapter Sixty-Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts, part 2

Asha crept up the corridor of the Grand Apartments, on silent feet. She was grateful she’d opted for the dress that could be dismantled into something approaching her normal battle gear, the skirts currently bundled up in a corner of the servants quarters and ready to be reattached. Still, fighting in a bodice was _not_ an experience she was desperate to repeat any time soon.

Suddenly, the remaining Venatori darted out of a shadowed doorway to her left, out and passed her before she had time to summon her spirit blade.

“Motherfucker!” she shrieked before giving chase, wondering how she’d missed them. 

In her defence, she’d barely gotten any sleep.

She could not believe that Cullen had kissed her hand. She supposed he had simply taken her suggestion - that an elvish connection would probably scandalise and diminish his entourage - and ran with it, but she could not believe he’d _ad-libbed!_

And of course it had backfired immensely, because no one saw a man like Cullen Rutherford perform a gesture out of the pages of a courtly romance and thought, “actually, no thanks, I’ll pass - not really my type!” From what she’d been able to see, he’d had twice as many followers when she’d snuck out of the ballroom tonight as yesterday.

She still couldn’t believe he’d kissed her hand!

But even more so, she could not believe her reaction to it. She was a grown woman. She’d had sex. Many times. But apparently that experience was all theoretical when faced with the barest whisper of his lips on the back of her hand. She was fairly sure she had still been vestally blushing even as they left the Palace, returned to their lodgings, and she lay out on her bed trying to think of _anything else_.

Really, it was _embarrassing_. It made a girl glad there were blood mages readily available to punch.

He paused at a junction, indecisive. Asha reached out her hand to send a chained lightning spell his way, when there was a wet thunk of a blade hitting flesh, and the last survivor fell onto the ground, dagger protruding from his skull. She gave a quick glance behind, but Cole was still with her, attempting to use his sphere of influence to hide them both. He was making as many people forget their presence as possible. It wouldn’t stop people from noticing her absence from the ballroom, but it would stop her being immediately identified as the source of the bloody swathe she’d cut through the Winter Palace.

A figure walked forward, on unclad feet, and there was another sticky sound as the blade was tugged loose. Asha recognised the green dress of Ambassador Briala, as the elf took out a handkerchief and began methodically cleaning the blade.

“'She sees the blood and it pays for some of what her people have shed. But who decides when it is enough? Will it ever be enough, to repay the hurt in kind?'” Cole shifted out of his empathetic mode, and then asked tentatively, “Um… should I…?”

“Keep yourself hidden,” Asha told him. “I’ll talk to her. Oh, and take that gods-damned halla statue with you.”

The spirit nodded and flickered out of existence. Briala had already started examining the corpses littering the corridor. Rather than startling when Asha’s presence crept back into her awareness, she simply glanced up, looking a little impressed and mildly amused.

“Fancy meeting you here,” she said, with a small smile. “Shouldn’t you be dancing, Inquisitor? What will the nobility say?”

“No one’s actually asked me yet,” Asha pointed out. “But let’s pretend they’re all devastated, if only for my sake.”

“You have been busy. I suppose I should compliment you on your work - I only _suspected_ it was you. It will take a month to get all of the Tevinter blood off the marble.”

“No actual blood at my end, really - that’s the perk of a spectral sword. Yours is nice and messy, though.”

“So, the emissary in the courtyard is not your handiwork?” the woman smiled behind her modest mask as she led Asha up to the balcony. “I figured Gaspard’s invitation to you was one of convenience, and not actually a formal alliance. I doubt he’d ever have the mind to invite you to the table, when he still believes we will all grovel at his boots.”

“You think this is Gaspard?” Asha couldn’t help but note how convenient that was, given that Gaspard had pinned the simmering unrest on Briala. Not convenient for Gaspard… it would be _really_ stupid to try and get an elven Inquisitor on side by drawing attention to your own crimes and saying ‘elves did it’. But to have everyone pointing the finger at each other was definitely convenient for _someone_. 

Who? Celene?

“He’s been smuggling in chevaliers for weeks now. But killing a Council emissary and bringing in Vint assassins? I had no idea he’d gotten that desperate.”

Asha wasn’t convinced that he had… _It was hardly smuggling,_ she thought dubiously, _when they all got to wear special capes announcing their presence._ Gaspard had bought military might to the ball - but he wasn’t really being underhand about it.

However, she was pretty certain that in any conversation in Orlais - never mind one with a spymaster - you didn’t just blurt out the evidence you’d amassed while unpicking conspiracies. So Asha smiled and nodded along with the Ambassador’s accusations.  
Halfway through, she pinpointed the moment when Briala saw through the ruse. “I’ve clearly misjudged you, Inquisitor,” she said. “You might just be an ally worth having. What could you do, with an army of elven spies at your disposal?”

It was almost an exact wording of Gaspard’s own offer the night before, leading Asha to wonder if the echo was deliberate. 

“You should think it over,” Briala said with a smile. “My information can be useful to you. I’ll even offer you a small taste, for free.”

“Oh?”

“That lovely Commander of yours? Someone has designs on him.”

For an awful, mortifying second, Asha wondered if Briala was simply referring to her own crush. 

“Well done,” she said, trying to act nonchalant. “You have eyes. Half of Orlais is currently mauling him as we speak. Who knew Ferelden farm boy was such a prime cut of meat?”

“You might wish to pay attention to Lady Aurelié Desmarais of Velun, in particular,” Briala informed her. "She wants a templar in the family to manage her apostate son, locked away in her attic, raging at the voices which besiege him without a Harrowing to quiet them. She plans for her daughter to get Rutherford alone, claim he has compromised her virtue, and then force him to take responsibility. The daughter in question has no virtue to speak of, so it will be hard to disprove. Unless you think your man disinclined to aid damsels in distress, you might want to stop him from hearing any cries for help, this night.”

“ _Fenedhis_ ,” Asha said. Cullen was chivalrous to the point of stupidity, and would help anybody. He’d probably give up his half-cape, if someone sneezed.

And everyone fucking knew it. She really, really wished he hadn’t kissed her hand.

She waited until Briala was gone to leg it back to the ballroom - she didn’t want to be quite so transparent about the things that mattered to her. Two of Leliana’s agents were waiting, one to wipe blood from her face and the other to lace her back into her skirts. Today’s dress was a purple gown, one that began the weak lavender of an early dawn sky, and deepened and deepened to indigo at the hem. The skirts were belted round her middle, and to hide the join between them, there was then a sheer overdress with shimmering thread running through it. Asha tugged it on - wrestling with its long, billowing sleeves that puddled around her elbows when she raised her hands.

“Remember to wait for the second bell,” the agent at her back hissed, while the other poked her hairpins back into place.

“I’m not sure there’s time!” Asha hissed, “look - I know how this sounds, but... can you please tell Leliana to make sure that Cullen does not leave the ballroom tonight with any single girls?”

“Um… my lady?”

“Just do it, please!”

She was slightly breathless once she made it back to the ballroom, trying to scope out Inquisition uniforms among the throngs of people. Vivienne gave her a warning look - clearly, breathlessness was too much of a crack in her veneer. But Asha ignored it, and felt a physical wave of relief when she spotted Cullen, still in the exact same spot as before, fending off his adoring fans. 

Seconds later, he looked over and saw her. Without thinking, she waved. Her overdress shimmered in the light, mimicking the effect of sunlight on water, while her long sleeves flailed a little. He smiled back.

Asha started walking over to warn him, when someone intercepted. It was the Duchess of Lydes - the woman with an undercut to rival Dorian's.

“Inquisitor Lavellan? I am Grand Duchess Florianne de Chalons - welcome to my party.”

Bollocks... what was her curtsy again? Asha made a valiant attempt. “Um, I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, as if it wasn’t the Orlesian national pastime, “but do you need to speak to me _right_ now?”

“This is Orlais, Ashatarsylnin,” Asha fought a bodily shudder at the use of her full name. “Nothing happens by accident.”

 _That’s not really an answer,_ Asha thought, but then Florianne was moving away, with the confidence of someone who expected to be immediately followed. “I believe you and I are both concerned by the actions of a certain person. Come, dance with me. Spies will not hear us on the dancefloor.”

 _No spies, except for yours._ Asha wished she could just brush the request off and go quickly warn Cullen not to catch any swooning maidens unless he wanted to be trapped in wedlock, but she knew there was no way Leliana or Vivienne would forgive her for passing up such an opportunity to make a connection with the Duchess. “It’s not every day I get such an offer from such a beautiful woman,” she said, hoping the compliment didn’t sound half-hearted.

“Delightful girl,” Florianne smirked, and then held out her hand. It felt papery and cold as Asha allowed herself to be dragged onto the dancefloor. She took it as a victory that the Duchess had at least been the one to ask _her_ for the dance, not the other way around.

The music started up, and Asha thanked the Creators - it was a dance she actually fucking recognised. One with a Dalish hold, even. Florianne cast her an assessing glance as Asha confidently assumed the male position in their couple. “Tell me, have the Dalish gained a sudden passion for politics?”

“We’re dancing, my lady. I know this is Orlais, but I’m certain the two things aren’t _quite_ the same.”

“Ahh, yes. I’m sure you and your holy retinue in their military uniforms came all the way here to my little house, because you heard my orchestra is second to none. Tell me, what do you know about our civil war?”

Pretty direct, for an Orlesian, so Asha decided to meet like for like. “More than some of the people here, I’d wager - given that it’s being fought on our lands,” she replied, her thoughts on her sister and Keeper Hawen’s clan.

“My word,” Florianne said innocently, “which lands are those, Inquisitor? I was not aware that the skirmishes had reached the Frostbacks.”

“It seems like Orlais cannot wage a single war, without the Exalted Plains becoming its focal point. It strikes me as... myopic, to think that the Dalish are completely blind to the turnings of an Empire, when they nearly always find themselves under its thumb.”

“My, don’t let my brother or my cousin hear you speak so openly. I find discussions of elves often descend into territory one can only describe as gauche, and I so desperately want to keep this party fashionable.” However, despite her words, Florianne looked delighted, like the Inquisitor had performed an unexpected trick by being outspoken. Asha wished she could pretend it was a ploy on her part to get the woman to open up, but mostly she was just glancing up at the balcony whenever she could to try and see if Cullen was still there, as the dance started. “I suppose I should not be surprised to find the Empire at the centre of everyone’s world.”

“That tends to happen, with Empires. The successful ones make it so.”

“And yet, most would say we are ailing, too preoccupied with battling each other to bother looking outside of our diminishing borders. All this fighting, even under the banners of a truce. Celene and Gaspard insist on stabbing each other, as if it’s interesting to catalogue all the ways Orlais can bleed. The security of the Empire is at stake right now, Inquisitor, and neither one of us wishes to see it fall.”

“Do we both want that, Lady Florianne?” 

“I suppose, that if you are the savage your opponents paint you as, your wishes might be different. Perhaps you wish to see all of us dead. I hope we are of one mind on this, however.”

“And yet you have yet to tell me your own mind? How can I tell whether or not we are aligned?”

“An expert evasion.”

Asha span her in a swish of skirts. “One that I hope enables you to forgive any other flaws in my dancing.”

“You’re moving beautifully, Ashatarsylnin. Don’t you fret.”

Asha fought the urge to roll her eyes at the blatant Orlesian crypticism, and decided to focus on dancing, if Florianne was just going to bait her into a conversation where no knowledge was actually exchanged. A quick glance up - Cullen was still there. Watching the both of them, in fact. Probably expecting Florianne to murder her on the spot because of the colour of her shoes, or something.

“I confess I didn’t know what to expect from you, Inquisitor. A tranquil redeemed by Andraste herself… it almost directly contradicts doctrine, you understand. You are a curiosity for many, and a matter of concern for some.”

They switched to Dalish hold, and Asha had to brace Florianne’s own arms under the weight of the Duchess’ absurd mantle. “That’s one of the more polite things I’ve been called in Orlais. Am I a curiosity or a concern to you, your Grace?”

“Where does that question lead? To my opinions on the mage question? Elven rights? Andraste?" Florianne laughed, clear as a bell, “as far as I’m concerned, I am merely throwing a very important party. You have a role to play. And I would simply like to keep blood out of the marble.”

Asha noted the echo, as she had noted Briala's earlier. Was Florianne also trying to let her know everything her own spies had seen? 

“It doesn’t matter to me what you think of elves or mages or Andraste, your Grace. I don’t live in Orlais, and even if I did, you’re not the one on the throne, or even wishing to be.”

“I suppose... but that’s a rather impolite thing to be pointing out in public,” Florianne’s eyes flashed - playfully, or with actual resentment? “I confess that I’m surprised to find you so blunt, after the amount of effort Madame de Fer no doubt put into sharpening your words on the whetstone of her civility. She always played it so _safe_ , when she was your age. So quiet and meek - that’s how Bastien used to like his women, you know. Only showed her fangs once she knew for certain no one could kennel her. If your stories are true, then you are actually someone who has truly known the leash as it tightens. Yet there is no temerity in you, whatsoever. I thought you had been taught... how to behave.”

Asha felt her expression becoming more and more wooden. There was amused appreciation in Florianne’s tone, but Asha found she didn't like where this metaphor was leading. She was just waiting for the word ‘muzzle’ to enter the conversation.

Florianne smiled again, “please don’t misunderstand me, Inquisitor. I’m so glad to see you are not an emotionless husk, when your conversation proves to be so diverting! It was always a particular victory of Vivienne, that she could achieve that state without the aid of a sunburst brand…” Asha couldn’t fight a wince, and Florianne misinterpreted it, “Ah, perhaps that is why you are deviating from whatever lines your director gave you? I suppose after being denied agency for so long, one always acts in one’s own interests, regardless of the consequences.” 

“You clearly want me to speak for myself,” Asha said flatly, “why would I be rude and deny the wishes of such a gracious host?”

“Wonderful, that one _would_ make Vivienne proud. But had you wished for a true riposte, you might have pointed out that everyone in this room acts in their own interests, simply with varying degrees of discretion.” Florianne smiled, while Asha mostly just felt patronised. “The question is simply what those interests are. Do you even yet know who is friend or foe?”

“I’m not having too much difficulty, your Grace. As you pointed out, I bought all _my_ friends their own uniforms.”

“You are not the only one,” Florianne cast a meaningful glance at the Chevalier dancing with an Antivan noble two couples down from them, in his majestic full cloak that was no doubt making Cullen green with envy. “Even friends may prove duplicitous, Inquisitor. We are all alone in the Winter Palace.”

“But I’m with you right now, Lady Florianne,” Asha replied evenly, as she braced and then dipped her. She watched the woman’s mask slip a little on her face, as somewhere, someone did something worthy of applause. “And didn’t you just say we’re of one mind?”

_Ok, so she’s shady as fuck,_ Asha thought, as she hastily left the dancefloor. The woman automatically assumed that she was working against Gaspard, and had offered to throw him to the wolves. Asha knew they were in Orlais, but still.

Maybe Florianne hated her brother, and had set up the entire event to trick him into acting rashly? Or maybe they were allies, and Gaspard had used his sister to get the Empress where he wanted her? If so, why was Florianne now ratting him out? And... wasn’t ‘acting honourably’ (to other _shem_ ) Gaspard’s single redeeming feature? Why did everyone think he was backstabbing Celene, when he’d refused to do so at any other point in the war?

She and Florianne had amassed an audience as they’d danced. Asha didn’t know why. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a Dalish elf could dance in a Dalish hold. But she supposed no one here gave a shit about how the Dalish danced, even as they imitated them. 

She pushed her way through the crowd, and cursed under her breath when she saw Cullen was no longer in his spot by the balcony, or by the window. In fact, he wasn’t anywhere in the room. She marched up to Leliana, who was stood with Ellana and Josie’s little sister. 

“Oh my goodness,” Yvette said, a slightly higher pitched echo of her sister. “You were so beautiful when you danced! Your dress glitters like starlight.”

“Where’s Cullen?” Asha demanded of Leliana in a harried whisper, “why didn’t you stop him from leaving?”

Leliana raised an eyebrow, “excuse me, Inquisitor?”

“Did you see where he went?”

“I believe the Commander left that way - one of the palace guards came to speak with him...”

“Fuck!” Asha hissed, and started striding off towards the door Leliana had indicated. She supposed she couldn't really blame the Nightingale... letting him leave with a guard was not in direct contradiction to her orders.

She went back into the Vestibule, looking around frantically. Sera, Isabela, and Hawke were all lounging against a wall with a very obviously defaced directly statue next to them, sipping from wine glasses and seemingly daring people to comment. “Have you seen Cullen?” Asha asked them.

“He went that way,” Sid replied, with an off-hand wave.

“Can you be more specific?!”

“...Two doors down that way, in the company of a guard.”

“Din’t really look like a guard,” Sera observed. “He walked all funny, but a different kind of funny. Little less stick up the arse than usual.”

“ _Bollocks_.”

“Why, is that problem? He’s a big boy, he can look after himself,” said Sid.

“He’s about to be accused of ravaging someone, and ruining their reputation.”

“Ooh, is it finally happening then?” Isabela cooed, “you _must_ give me a review afterwards. I’ve always been a little curious.”

“You said two doors down, right?” Asha asked, already moving away.

“Have fun! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

Asha pushed through the heavy blue doors, into a darkened corridor. It was nearly empty - she wondered if this would count as off-limits enough to earn her more censure from the court - so she picked up her skirts and started running, or what passed for it, in her shoes. The corridor was long, and every door along it was closed, some even locked. She wasted time pressing her ear up against each, and it was on her fourteenth, after the corridor had curved off to the left, that she finally heard the low hum of a male voice through the wood. 

At the same time, she heard the door she’d entered through open and then creak, but not fully shut. There was an authoritative female voice, demanding, “what are you doing? This part of the palace is off-limits!”

“My daughter!” was the simpering, theatrical response - just the acceptable Orlesian side of overdramatic, “I can’t find her!”

That was Lady Desmarais, then. “Fuck!” Asha hissed. Without a second to lose, she simply burst into the room.

It was a very unassuming room - two settees, a bureau against one wall, and a large oil painting of the Emerald Graves. Cullen stood at the far end, alongside a dainty, young girl with blonde hair in stiff ringlets, and a white half-mask with cat ears. The ‘guard’ was gone. There was nothing compromising about the arrangement - Cullen was stood a respectable distance away from her, even. But the girl was practically trembling either with excitement, or trepidation, at whatever she had planned.

“Asha!” Cullen said, clearly surprised by her arrival. The girl next to him also looked startled, then immediately terrified. “Is anything wrong? I was just helping the Mademoiselle de Velun - apparently she and her guard saw a figure heading this way-”

“Cullen, you fucking idiot. If you’re so fucking noble, then where the fuck is this girl’s chaperone?”

“I-” Cullen paused, then frowned as if the question had never occurred to him. Mademoiselle de Velun’s tremble became a full-on quake.

“Margot is beautiful! And so very trusting! I’m worried someone might have taken advantage of her!” came the querulous, obviously scripted voice from outside in the hallway, coming ever closer. “Please, please, you must help her!”

This was clearly some kind of cue, because suddenly the ‘so very trusting’ Margot Desmarais of Velun took a knife out from beneath her skirts. Cullen swore, immediately stepping forward to protect Asha from the blade, like an idiot. But all the girl did with it was slice through the laces conveniently located at the front of her bodice, so that her dress began to sag around her shoulders to reveal her shift underneath. She smudged through her lipstick with a violent scrub of her hand. Then, she darted over to the bureau against the wall, swept the two vases off of it so that they smashed on the floor, and began shouting, “ _Maman!_ Oh _maman_ , help me!”

The girl then lunged for Cullen, who evaded her grasping hands, looking thoroughly scandalised. “What on earth are you-”

By that point, Asha had closed the distance between them. She shoved the Mademoiselle Desmarais away - none too gently, and the girl weighed about as much as wet paper, so she went arse over tit on the floor. “ _Vyn esaya gera assan i’mar’av’ingala_ ,” she muttered vehemently when she reached Cullen. She grabbed hold of his tunic colour, fisting her hands into a death grip on the fabric, and fade-stepped the both of them away with an urgent _tug_.

By some blessing of fate, her estimation of distance worked, and they didn’t just merge with a wall, or end up two stories up in mid-air, outside the palace walls. They rematerialised in a dark room she _hoped_ was roughly two doors down, filled with cobwebs and large, bulky items all hidden under white sheets. Thick snowflakes of age-old dust danced on the air displaced by their arrival, and Cullen immediately started coughing. Terrified, Asha shoved both her hands over his mouth in an attempt to silence him. Sure enough, she heard footsteps against a tiled floor as Aurelié Desmarais de Velun, and whatever guards she bought with her, stampeded past their hiding place. They weren’t that far away from their original location. She’d only been able to cover a short distance in one hasty fade-step. 

A crash of a door breaking in, and a cry from the other side, as Cullen blinked owlishly down at Asha from above the hands covering his mouth, clearly trying to process _what the fuck was going on_. There was a silence, as the Lady of Velun recalibrated the sight of one ‘ravished’ daughter, but a distinct lack of a 'ravisher'.

Then, the bitch decided to improvise. “Oh, Margot! Oh, my love! Who did this to you? He must be held accountable!”

“I - oh, _maman_ \- he ran away, he didn’t want to get caught! But he said… he said he would...”

“Please, you must help my daughter!” the woman said, as Asha raised an eyebrow at Cullen, the closest she could get to an _I told you so_ while they were listening to this play out. “Find the person who did this to her! Honour demands he must answer!”

The same female authoritative voice as before. “Spread out, search the rooms.” It sounded entirely unconvinced, and infinitely more tired than before, but it seems the Desmarais family were too important not to follow orders from.

“ _Fenedhis,_ ” Asha whispered, thinking fast. She could try fade-stepping again, but she didn’t exactly remember where the left bend in the corridor fell, and if she miscalculated then they would either be in a really, really off-limits part of the palace, or literally plummeting to the earth. 

This room, with all its dust-sheets, was as good to hide in as any. She glanced around, as the door next to this one was tested, and mercifully proven to be unlocked. As the floorboards next door started to creak, she noticed a stack of massive, ten-foot-high canvases stacked at an angle between a sheet-covered armoir and the wall. With another glance at Cullen that she hoped conveyed her plan, she grabbed his hand and tugged him in that direction.

She grinned when the space between canvas and wall proved just as large as she was hoping, and promptly shoved the Commander in, pushing him further back through dust and into cobwebs. She gathered up the shimmering train of her skirt under her arm, and then followed, shuffling them both until they were sheltered deep in the shadowed recess between wardrobe, canvas, and wall.

The darkness was complete. Unthinkingly, she reached out and grabbed his hand, interlocking their fingers.

All she could hear was his breathing, and the creak of floorboards in the other room, through the wall. “Inquisitor-”

“There’s no light here, so hopefully they’ll just miss us entirely. Maybe the door’s locked. But if they find us,” she whispered, blindly tugging herself forward so that she could feel the long line of his body pressed against hers, “we’ll just make it look like we were both in this room the whole time. Can’t have ravished poor little Margot if you were busy, in here, ravishing me.”

Cullen all but choked on a mote of dust.

“Don’t worry, I won’t be demanding marriage,” she said, contorting herself in their hiding space and blindly patting what she hoped was his chest in reassurance.

“Yes, but… but I might!” he hissed back, sounding scandalised. She fought a snigger.

The next few minutes were the longest of her life, for a number of delicious and distressing reasons. The guards searched the corridor, to the accompaniment of some very loud, theatrical sobbing. When they reached the door to their room, Asha winced when it opened on unoiled hinges, letting in a spill of light from the corridor that thankfully didn’t penetrate their hiding place. The guards walked into the room, and they began to hear the flutter of fabric as dust sheets were lifted.

Asha made the executive, Inquisitorial - and obviously professional - decision... to move immediately to Plan B. She pressed herself even closer to Cullen in the dark. If someone managed to catch the two of them, they would look thoroughly compromised.

He let out a soft, utterly undetectable oath, a bare breath that ruffled her hair as she stepped in close enough for her forehead to bump lightly against his nose. She hoped that Aurelié's and Margot’s sobs covered it. She blindly groped upwards to find his shoulder with the hand not already holding his, as one of the guards muttered something. Her entire body was melded against him, so close that she could feel his thundering heartbeat echoing through her chest as if it was her very own.

He froze for a second. Then Asha bit her lip as his hand tentatively snaked round her waist to press into the small of her back and hold her closer. He was as tense as a coiled spring. She pressed her face into the curve between his neck and shoulder, while he watched the space beyond their hiding place, eyes tracking for signs of movement.

Someone walked up to the armoire. There was a creak as they opened the doors to look inside.

Even though they were both holding their breath, barely daring to breathe, Asha swore their twin heartbeats were the loudest things in the fucking room. 

This was going to haunt her dreams _for months_.

There was a heavy, heavy sigh… and then a shout from the corridor. The footsteps immediately began retreating. Asha sagged against Cullen at the same moment he dropped his forehead onto her shoulder, the tension leaking from both their bodies. If anything, that just made them look more compromised than before. They remained still and silent as the room emptied in a flurry of activity, and the door swung shut again.

They needed to remain hidden in the room until the search was over. But there was no reason they couldn’t break apart, now it had been searched. Still, Asha was, to borrow the phrase of Orlesian nobleman, ‘a weak woman’. She had an excuse, and she was too selfish not to use it, so she buried her face against his collar and took a deep breath of his clean scent. Cullen seemed to be taking his cues from her, and that meant neither of them broke apart as the guards moved down the corridor, and the cries of the Ladies of Velun grew fainter and fainter.

Cullen - damn him - was of course too noble to let it go on for too long. “...Do you think they’re gone?” he whispered, and Asha felt a shiver ripple all the way down her spine at the rush of his breath in her ear.

“Hmm?” she murmured, not really trusting her voice. She pushed gently against his chest, trying to extract herself from his arm. She craned her neck to look up at him.

Only to freeze, as she felt his nose brush against hers, as _he_ also disentangled himself from _her_ at the same moment. He paused, too. They both took a sharp breath of the same air, clearly startled.

 _Fen’harel ver na_ , Asha thought, as she looked up and tried to make any sense of the shape of him in the darkness. Why had _he_ stopped moving? There was no way that she was going to back down now-

“I thought it was the front of paintings that were interesting, not the backs of them,” came a soft, confused voice from behind them, and Asha jumped out of her fucking skin, swearing. Like she'd been scalded, she hastily backed up to avoid headbutting Cullen and breaking his nose. She tumbled out of the shadows, to see Cole standing at the mouth of their hiding place.

“The Nightingale said I should try to find you. You’ve been gone a long time. There were guards who wanted an excuse to get back to their post, so I gave them one,” the spirit said, frowning. 

Then he frowned, deeper, as if hearing a far-off sound, and Asha felt looming dread as he opened his mouth to say-

“Yes Cole, I love you, thank you so much for coming here to find us, but we don’t have time to talk right now,” Asha said hastily, cutting him off before he could speak. She was more than aware of her current internal monologue - she didn’t need a dramatic reading of it, as Cullen also pulled himself out of the dark. “Thank you for finding us. Could you possibly find either Aurelié or Margot Desmarais, and convince them they need to go back home? Out of Halamshiral? Back to Velun? Immediately?”

“Leaving you here… will that help?”

“It will help me _immensely_ ,” Asha said, her voice shaky. “The Commander, too.”

The spirit nodded, then disappeared again. Asha let out a long sigh, then a cough. A cobweb was dislodged from her hair.

“What… the fuck… was that?” Cullen asked, breathing sounding laboured. For an awful second, she thought he meant her plan to save him, before he continued, “that girl… she was practically a child!”

Oh. So it seemed like the plan to save him, and all that had followed, had barely registered. 

Creators damn her, was the man made from fucking _stone?_

“Mythal, and all her motherfucking host,” Asha said, feeling extremely flustered. She smoothed down her skirts, and Cullen sneezed, and she found herself wishing that something more had happened that could justify how the entire thing left her feeling so… undone. “Next time a woman invites you into an empty room alone… _don’t fucking go!_ Fucking Orlais! If you’re going to be assaulted like this, maybe we should get _you_ a bloody chaperone!”

Cullen hesitated, then reached out and plucked a fat mote of dust from her hair, examining it. “...Do you think Mademoiselle Desmarais will have to pay for both of those vases?”

Asha paused, considering. "I'm personally more inclined to wonder... what the fuck were they going to do when they found her in there with _both_ of us? Say that we'd _both_ ravished her? Claim it was some kind of debauched Dalish thing? ...Would she have been forced to marry us both?"

They both glanced at each other. Then collapsed into laughter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you had fun with this chapter! Do you know how long I've been saving up this 'oh no! we have to hide in a confined space together' trope??!
> 
> More Halamshiral shenanigans next week. I'll see you then ;) xx
> 
> Edit 01/02/2021: [I did an art for this](https://ashatarsylnin.tumblr.com/post/641944696659263488/asha-lavellan-at-the-winter-palace-her-outfit-is)!! If anyone is interested.


	66. Chapter Sixty-Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts, part 3

“Are you _fucking kidding me?!_ ” Asha said.

It was the morning of their third day of Halamshiral. She was taking her breakfast on the balcony with her advisors, and her nerves were… frayed a little, at the edges. Her mood had worsened, following another restless night of little sleep. Her sole two hours of rest had resulted in a dream about shadowy hiding places that was so sordid that she was might actually be contractually obligated to avoid Cole for the next two weeks.

She couldn’t even look at Cullen.

At least, she couldn’t… until he and Leliana started spouting _utter rubbish._

“You think I should just let _Celene die?!_ ” she demanded. Josephine hastily shushed her, glancing worriedly over the balcony.

“What Corypheus wants is chaos,” Leliana reasoned, “even with Celene alive, that could still happen. We don’t need her - all we need is stability. By tomorrow evening, someone must emerge victorious.”

“And it doesn’t need to be Celene. She’s right,” Cullen said, running his hand through his bedhead and downing the rest of his coffee.

“I - you - I...” Asha took a heaving breath, trying in vain to calm herself.

Josie didn’t look angry, simply horrified. “Do you realise what you’re suggesting, Leliana?”

The Nightingale’s face was hard. “Sometimes the best path is not the easiest one.”

“I… are you telling me…” Asha said, fury indignantly building within her as she finally managed to string a sentence together, “that I put in _months_ of work and effort - that we came all the way here, spent twenty thousand gold, at least, on stupid dresses - that I walked straight into a room full of people who hate everything about me and weathered insults about my people, my sanity, and my magic - asked if my tranquility had 'taught me how to behave', right to my fucking face - all to save the life of a woman who _you now don’t want to be saved?!_ ”

“Who mentioned your tranquility?” Cullen demanded.

“I know Gaspard isn’t a good alternative,” Leliana said at the same time, “but Briala -”

"If we were just going to let Briala take over Orlais then _why the fuck am I even here?_ " Asha shrieked. "Oh wait! I know why! _Because that's what Corypheus wants!_ "

All three advisors fell silent. When she levelled her gaze at Cullen, he hastily looked away, ears burning. She couldn't work out whether it was with residual embarrassment, or new shame.

“I will _not_ let Celene die.” Asha said, vehemently, “she’s no doubt a terrible person, and from what Vivienne says she was a _shitty_ girlfriend. But if we were just going to let her get assassinated then… why the fuck are we even wasting our time here? I could be in Skyhold, right now, with a blanket and a cup of tea, or better yet, sleeping!”

She jabbed an accusatory finger towards her advisors, “you forced me into this fucking viper’s nest, don’t you dare double back and ask me to sabotage our entire reason for being here in the first place. I’m an _elf_. Why the fuck would I commit treason, in a place that already wants to kill me!? I am stopping that assassination. I will not let a murder take place, just because you lot suddenly want to play at manipulating an empire!”

It seemed that righteous fury worked almost as well as adrenaline for keeping a person awake. A few hours later, Asha was storming through the disgustingly manicured gardens. She was in such a vile mood that she had nearly caused a negotiation with a lyrium merchant - one of Vivienne’s contacts - to implode, so Josie had let her take an afternoon off. She’d stripped out of her awful, stifling uniform and was revelling in the luxury of a plain shirt and breeches. Of course, dressing plainly in the palace grounds meant that everyone kept mistaking her for a servant. It took waving the anchor in their face directly to stop them from issuing commands.

She was contemplating chucking one particularly obnoxious man into one of the ponds when she spotted Solas out of the corner of her eye. He was - quite sensibly - wearing his uniform, without the stupid hat, and talking with an older-looking elven servant, whose weathered face bore a faded vallaslin. He saw her approaching, nodded to the servant, who quickly scurried away.

“You look tired,” he observed.

“Well, hello to you too,” she said, a little waspishly, while he flashed her an amused grin. She glanced at the retreating servant, “what was that about?”

“...I was merely passing on one of the tasks the nobility keeps assigning to me, without stopping to check I’ve agreed.”

“Fucking Orlesians,” Asha grumbled.

Solas raised an eyebrow at her tone. “Not enjoying our time here, in the wonders of Halamshiral?”

“And you _are_?”

“There is some entertainment to be had,” he replied mildly, as they began walking side-by-side, “I do enjoy the heady blend of power, intrigue, danger, and sex that permeates events such as these.”

Asha got a flashback to the space behind canvasses with Cullen, and hoped she didn’t blush.

“Oh?” she said, grateful her voice was steady, “you mean you also overheard that conversation between Isabela and Bull, comparing conquests on the carriage-ride home?”

He chuckled. “I would’ve thought you knew exactly what I meant, _lethallan_. You certainly seem as if you were also enjoying yourself as well. Commanding the attention of an entire room. Your dance with the Duchess of Lydes was beautiful.”

She snorted, “I looked like I was _having fun_? I guess we really do have to congratulate Vivienne on her tutelage.”

“It is not solely Madame de Fer. At least, I highly doubt it. Surely you knew what you were doing?” he gave her a long, unreadable look. “...Did you not know your dress was reminiscent of those priestesses of Mythal, who were once dedicated to purifying the waters of Elvhenan?”

“Oh… I did, actually,” Asha said, thinking back to the sheer gown that had shimmered like water and clung like a second skin. “The tailor’s assistant was an elf. They proposed it. I mean, it was more a practical case of ‘how do we make something that can be taken apart for battle-related shenanigans’, but apparently they’d studied tomes on elven culture and dress. I think they just thought it was ‘elfy’, but the material was beautiful. They were very talented. They deserved more than just an apprenticeship.”

“An elven Inquisitor, commanding the dancefloor in the clothes of the most powerful of her people,” Solas gave a small smile. “Purging the _shem_ court of corruption. Truly a sight to behold.”

And she’d been focused on trying to save Cullen, from essentially a poor-man’s bed trick. Asha kept her mouth shut and decided not to shatter Solas’ very grand illusions about her.

“Wait till you see tonight’s gown. It’s designed by the same person, and I think they might have been a little angry when they drew it up,” she said. The dress in question was white, and was that colour in full knowledge that it was the colour of Dalish funerals. She raked her hair out of her face, sighing. “It's nice that you thought all of that was intentional. You make it sound like I’m in control.”

“...Do you not feel like that is the case?”

One glance over at Solas, and she knew that he saw every emotion written in her face. Well. All her probably saw was anger, tinged with anxiety. He raised a single, questioning eyebrow, and with a heavy sigh, Asha began to explain the situation. How everyone was trying to blame Gaspard, when she was half-convinced he considered back-stabbing somehow beneath his rigid, if distorted, code of honour. How Cullen and Leliana seemed to think Celene was unfit to rule, but they’d only decided to bring it up with her _now_ , with two nights left to determine the fate of the Empire.

“I can’t put an expansionist on the throne, can I?” she said, as they sat down at a bench by one of the reflection pools. “I just can’t. Gaspard wants the Empire to conquer again - I’d essentially be eradicating the remaining Dalish territories with my own hand. And I like Briala, but there’s no way she can take the throne without being kicked off it and killed within the week. No stability there. Josie suggested a reconciliation using the locket I found, but… people break off relationships for a reason, you know?”

She sighed, “I thought I was just supposed to stop the assassin, but apparently now that’s not enough. Even though we _still_ don’t know even who the assassin even is.”

“You could simply save Celene, and have done with it.”

“...But the thing is, Leliana and Cullen are right,” Asha said. “Everything she does is so… superficial. She’s nice to elves to please her lover. She’s nice to mages because they amuse her. She starts a war on Gaspard and kills thousands because a play makes a bad joke. The only reason she lasted this long was because she had Briala exerting influence to shore up all her bad decisions.”

“That is the right of monarchs - to turn the fates of entire countries, based on their fleeting whims.”

“Oh yes, well, I’d loved to abolish the monarchy and establish the Democratic Republic of Orlais, smart arse, but our accommodation is only booked until the end of the week,” Asha replied, with a glare. Solas smirked at her bratty behaviour, and after a second Asha smiled back, some of the resentment leaking from her body. She was so glad she had someone to rant at - someone who immediately _understood_ why she was struggling. She loved her advisors but they were so... Andrastian. Human.

“Do you honestly want my advice?” Solas asked. His expression was thoughtful and a little reserved.

“Yes. _Please”_

“...Do not pick what is best for the Empire,” he told her, calmly and carefully, weighing each word. “Greater minds, with grander ambitions and years to unpick what best serves civilisations, have tried to build visions that shore up empires. Many fail, catastrophically."

"Right."

_"_ Instead, simply pick what is best for you.”

_“...Excuse me?”_

“Pick what _you_ want. Pick what will shore up _your_ power,” he continued, his eyes never leaving hers, his voice awfully level for someone discussing sedition on Imperial Grounds. As Asha began to feel more and more ill, he sighed. “Forgive me for being blunt, but you don’t seem to want anyone dead. You dislike Gaspard, rightly so, but you balk at pinning a conspiracy on him just for the sake of seeing his head roll. You want Briala alive, so you can use her people,” at Asha’s sideways glance he smiled, “...I assume she has already made you the offer. You don’t think Celene has committed enough of a crime to simply be slaughtered - though she has committed many, many crimes, nearly all of them against your own people.”

“I just. I can’t… it’s not up to me who lives or dies, in this. We're not even part of Orlais! We're meant to be neutral!” Asha said, then sighed. The words were a weak and convenient disguise, and Orlais was a mess. She could do whatever she want, if she chose to. But the type of leadership she was used to was one that focused on looking after others, not annihilating them.

Admittedly, though, the people you looked after in a clan situation were ones you actually liked-

“A foolish ideal to many, and one that probably irks our Nightingale to no end. But that perspective is one that puts you in a unique position,” Solas said. “If you have your way, by the end of this week, you will have three very powerful people who all owe you their lives. You are currently the only thing standing between them and death - from all sides. If you make sure they are very, very aware of that fact, then you have a new type of power - one that is perhaps far more influential than the control of merely one puppet.”

“Are you suggesting… mercenary benevolence?” she said, with a frown, “make it seem like I saved them so they owe me, rather than just because I don’t want them dead?”

“Precisely,” Solas replied. They watched as two elven servants hurried across their vision, carrying a heavy bolt of cloth that kept slipping from their grasp. Another hurried after a masked noble, who kept barking at her in Orlesian. “But more importantly, what I’m suggesting is that you leave this ball having shown all three greatest players in the Grand Game that an elven apostate with three months of training can beat them, fresh from the forest. That, at least, shall provide us with ample entertainment - enough that we might look back on this all with fondness, in a few months’ time.”

“Big words, from the 'apostate hobo',” Asha grumbled. “But I still don’t know who the fuck the assassin is.”

The assassin was fucking Florianne.

Of course it fucking was. No one hosted a ball, in the middle of a war, if they didn’t want someone dead. Even in Orlais.

Asha had thought the night was going well. She’d gone back to Leliana with a revised version of Solas’ plan, worded to suit the Nightingale’s taste: blackmail. Lots and lots of good, juicy blackmail. Gaspard, Briala, and Celene were all useful assets if the Inquisition had something to hold over each of their heads. For one thing, they wanted to lay siege to Emprise du Lion in a month of two, once the winter thaw broke. Save all three rulers, amass enough material to have leverage over them, and then the Inquisition controlled all aspects of Orlais’ infrastructure, or could at least nudge the Empire’s moving parts in the directions that suited them.

She hadn’t imagined her blackmail for Celene to come in the form of a kinky soldier, but hey! The woman started a war over one veiled mention of her preference for Briala. Planned counter-attacks against Gaspard were one thing, but Asha had a feeling that the revelation of a secret sex-dungeon boudoir might also be useful leverage.

Of course, none of that mattered, if she couldn’t stop Florianne right now.

“You poor, deluded thing,” the woman cooed. Rain fell softly in the courtyard, drenching Asha’s shoulders and soaking through the thin material of her dress. Some of it sizzled and created sparks against the tear of the rift. “You don’t know half of what Samson and I have planned. And now, I suppose you never will.”

Asha raised her hand to cast a spell. The movement triggered something, and she cried out as an arrow flew out of the darkness and embedded itself in the meat of her shoulder, bringing a fiery churn of pain with it. She’d never been shot before. Normally, she was barriered, and they all just bounced off. Her vision flared, and in the distance she heard the Duchess’ imperious instruction: “kill her. Bring me the marked hand as proof. Or maybe just her brand.”

“She can ally with all the magisters in Tevinter, darkspawn or otherwise, and none of them will have the power to make that dress look good on her,” Vivenne remarked over the din, drawing her spirit blade hilt.

Asha would've complimented Madame de Fer for actually displaying a sense of humour, but everything seemed very far away. She couldn't tell if her vision was doubling, or if there were just that many soldiers about to descend on them...

“Asha!” cried Solas, behind her, as she fought to keep herself standing. That was all he said, but one look back at him and she immediately understood what he wanted her to do. Florianne had set this trap according to her own designs: more chaos, it seemed, was the only way to derail her plan.

She raised her other hand, felt the tug of connection with the rift.

“Are you sure that’s wise-” Cassandra asked, and then Asha did it anyway.

Another volley of arrows came from the dark at the flare of her anchor. As connection snapped between her and the rift, Asha fought through the pain, and at her right-hand side Vivienne - of all people - pulled up a disruption field, sending the bolts arching up and back. A few just embedded in the wet earth, others met enemy flesh, as demons spewed out from the opening, rippling rift. She heard a choked scream, smelled burnt earth and blood as a rage demon carved a path towards the soldiers Florianne had used to line her trap. A despair demon fluttered up and out into the darkness, with a breathless wail.

After that, Asha simply fought to stay alive.

She had no armour on. Her plans for the evening had escalated beyond what she had expected. Tonight was supposed to be a reconnaissance mission, collecting the material that would make her plan work. There were so many assailants - she supposed she should be flattered by the sheer numbers, even if the trap itself was incredibly unsophisticated. They were surrounded and besieged on all sides.

She was fighting off a soldier, parrying his blows with Valour as she threw fire mines down behind him to blindly take out archers, when a shade pounced on her back. It sunk its teeth into her shoulder, tearing through fabric to skin, causing the arrow shaft already embedded there to splinter, and the arrow head to dig itself in deeper, now at a new, entirely novel angle. She desperately tried to amass a mindblast to force the demon off, all the while screaming. Solas glanced at her, panicked, but his mana was focused on bringing down a firestorm on the soldiers flooding the courtyard, leaving smouldering ruins in the spell’s wake.

Cassandra stabbed the beast through the head - narrowly missing Asha’s ear - and Asha stumbled away, turning to see a soldier launching themselves at her from the balcony above, two daggers drawn. She reached up and, lightheaded, clenched her fist to summon a Winter’s Grasp. They fell to the earth, legs leaden with ice. She brought Valour up and around, separating their head from their shoulders with a shriek.

Another three soldiers on her left, a terror demon on her right. She set fire mines under the human men, bought Valour round to address the other enemy. There was a roaring in her ears that had nothing to do with a terror demon’s characteristic shriek. The shade’s claw marks burned like acid. The arrow head jarred against bone. Someone came towards her, axe drawn.

“Vivienne!” Solas shouted, almost a command, though it seemed far away.

“I suppose if needs must, darling,” came the arch response from somewhere behind her. Then there was an incredibly unladylike grunt of effort from the First Enchanter. Suddenly, the ground under Asha’s feet began to glow.

A glyph seared through the earth, bright silver and gold, the colour of starlight. Resurgence. It was a spell Asha had read about in her Knight Enchanter tome, but she didn’t have the knowledge to cast it yet, having always been a poor healer.

Asha’s vision faltered, then adjusted, becoming clearer like the lens of a telescope. She felt a rush of magic, like a harsh, cold draft of wind, and suddenly the bloody wounds on her arms and legs were healing over, whether she wanted them to or not. Valour moved forward, almost of its own accord, sunk through the stomach of the soldier in front of her, burning his clothes and dropping him with a wet gurgle.

When the assailants finally stopped descending on them, Asha was a ragged, bloody mess. There were welts of healing claw marks on her arms and face. Blood pooled from her mangled, half-forcibly-healed shoulder, drenching the front of her gown. She walked forward on shaky legs, mind adrift as Cassandra interrogated a Ferelden mercenary. Everything felt tight, and she winced every time she pulled fresh, reformed skin in the wrong way.

She was injured, and resurgence was only a temporary fix. Vivienne’s spell would keep her standing, but all of the magically cultivated stamina in the world would only serve to keep her going as long as her adrenaline did. She didn’t dare pull out the arrow shaft, particularly as her flesh had now all but healed around the mangled, splintered inch still protruding out of her collarbone. Better to leave that to a trained healer, who would have to reopen the wound.

The third bell sounded across the palace. They were going to be late returning to the ballroom.

Normally she wouldn’t give a shit, but Florianne would take her absence as a signal to strike.

“Is her plan literally just to stab Celene?” Asha asked, a little light-headed with bloodloss as they sprinted towards the ballroom, “and Orlais is so gods-damned convoluted that that will work?”

They barrelled through Halmashiral’s chapel, only to run headlong into another troop of Venatori.

“Oh, bollocks,” Asha said, succinctly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, I would've loved to continue just shoving Cullen and Asha into small spaces continually until they kiss, but I had to get back to the plot just a little! Tomorrow's chapter will have more ship content :) xx


	67. Chapter Sixty-Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts, part 4

Cullen frowned, as Empress Celene began her ascent to the balcony.

“Are you married, Commander?” asked a noblewoman on his left. He had no means of determining her age behind a full, brittle mask of duck egg blue. All the miscellaneous courtiers just sort of blurred together, by this point.

“Not yet, but I am already... taken.” A dizzying flashback to shimmering fabric over skin, and a shared, ragged breath in the darkness, that he tried to shake off even as it raised the hairs on the back of his neck. 

They had bigger issues to attend to, right this moment. His eyes desperately scanned the crowd for Asha. Where was she? They’d assumed that Celene was going to be murdered on the final night because that was the… _Orlesian_ way to do things. But something had switched in Halamshiral’s programme without even the Nightingale getting wind of it. It had only been Morrigan, sidling up to tell him he might want to get his troops - ‘meagre as they are’ - into position, that had alerted him to any danger. And by then, the Inquisitor had already left.

He’d gotten his men into position as a precaution, but Asha needed to give the final say on how they should act. What she’d said that morning was correct: if they acted wrongly now, she - as the convenient elven scapegoat in the mix - would likely be blamed, regardless of if it was her decision or not.

“Let all gathered attend! Her Imperial Majesty will now address the court!”

Cullen moved closer to the balcony, as the crowds massed into the ballroom to look at Celene from on high. He scanned the masked faces, but there was nothing to suggest one was any more sinister than the other. His hand rested at the ceremonial sword at his hip - not his weapon of choice, but the only one he’d been allowed to carry into the ballroom. A glance towards Leliana showed that the Nightingale’s expression was stormy. Their shared look held the same question:

Where was the Inquisitor?

There was a ghostly flicker at Leliana’s side - Cole, reporting in. Cullen only noticed because he was a trained templar, and even then his brain wanted to deny the spirit’s presence. Celene began her speech as the Duchess of Lydes smiled beneficently from her right-hand side. He wondered if this was her orchestration, as the Mistress of Ceremonies. 

“My friends, we are here to witness a historic moment,” Duchess Florianne said, picking up where the Empress left off.

The crowd around him parted in a way that was so silent it was only supernatural, and suddenly Cole was also at his side. Cullen hoped for a report on Asha, but instead all the boy said was, “‘I will remake the world with her blood, and in such a way that everyone shall know it was _my_ hand that shaped the future. No half-truths. No masks. Vision clear, unhindered, exposed. Knife bites through corset, through ribs, to the very heart of an Empire.”

Cullen blinked, taking in the scene again. As he knew from several experiences that Asha had thankfully _not_ been present for, Cole’s empathy always captured emotions in the moment. The Duchess of Lydes was still talking. Gaspard stood in the ballroom below his cousin, as did Briala, face stony behind her modest mask. Neither of them were in the position to stab Celene, publicly. “...The Duchess of Lydes is the assassin?” he whispered.

Cole nodded.

Leliana was stood exactly where she had been before. Despite being given the same information, she hadn’t acted. She watched Cullen receive the news with a steely glare, expression clearly signalling that she wanted to wait. 

But Asha had given one clear order: she didn’t want Celene to die. Cullen had to help the Empress.

He surged against the crowd, trying to break through the throngs of people, at the very moment Florianne moved behind Celene.

“Isn’t that right, Gaspard?” she said, with a catlike smile. She drew a wicked, serrated-edged dagger, and plunged it down into Celene’s back.

At the same moment, there was a familiar discordant note that sang through the air. 

A translucent barrier shimmered like water across the Celene’s skin, and Florianne overbalanced as her blade glanced off the Empress’ side.

“The Duchess of Lydes is working for Corypheus!” came a shout from the other end of the ballroom, “Inquisition, to arms!”

Cullen glanced over to see Asha storming in from the Vestibule with her party at her back. At the start of the night, she’d been dressed in a white dress, all harsh lines with a high collar and flared shoulders that mimicked the silhouette of armour. Every seam and hem was deep crimson - deep, blood red lines formed a pattern around the skirt that mimicked tree branches. The bodice was laced with scarlet ribbons. All Andrastian colours, but the message was not particularly subtle: a Dalish elf dressed in the colour of remembrance in the grounds of Halamshiral, stylised bloody forests marring her hem as she walked.

Now the dress was… well. A lot more red. The left shoulder and bodice were ripped, one shoulder hanging loose around inflamed welt and bite marks on her skin. Her front was stained with wet crimson, still shining fresh under the light of the chandeliers. Her skirt was half scorched with dark burns on one side, and ripped almost to the hip on the other. Her lip was split and smashed bloody, her hair - which had been pulled back in a bun - was in disarray, a tumble of dishevelled curls down her back, damp with rain.

He got a brief glimpse of her, bloody and furious, before she took a step forward and her image flickered, as she fade-stepped out of existence and up toward Florianne.

“Inquisition, to arms! Protect Celene! Protect Gaspard! Protect Briala!” Cullen shouted, startling the once-simpering crowds around him who now parted much more easily, as he rushed towards the Duchess, drawing his sword. The men and women he’d brought to the ballroom all moved into action, just as Asha reappeared on the steps by Gaspard before disappearing again in a flutter, and Florianne gave an angry, snarling shout while Celene fell to the ground in a faint.

The ballroom descended into chaos as, from the seas of masked people, the exaggerated, gruesome masks of Harlequins began to emerge, otherwise dressed exactly like the other courtiers, their wicked curved daggers already drawn. Screams rang out as random bystanders were cut down. Cullen’s troops, both in armour and without, rushed to engage. Dorian shouted something in Tevene, summoning a horror to throw an assassin off and away from Briala. Gaspard drew his own rapier. Morrigan ran to Celene’s aid. Cullen saw Sera draw a mechanical hand-crossbow from her sleeve out of the corner of his eye. and wondered if Varric would ever let her hear the end of it. Somewhere in the fray below, he heard the delighted laugh of Isabela as steel rang against steel.

On the dais, Florianne was already fleeing, leaving Celene in a crumpled heap by the balustrade. Seconds later, Asha flickered back into existence. Her figure was silhouetted against the open doors for a second, and then she sprinted out and off the balcony, after the Duchess. 

Cullen sprinted forward, arriving by the Empress at the same moment that a Harlequin leapt from the fray below and scaled the balcony railing in front of her, hauling themselves over the edge. Morrigan, next to the crumpled Celene on the floor and desperately trying to rouse her, gave a shout, buying her and Celene enough time with a Winter’s Grasp that froze the assassin solid, before Cullen cut it down.

He glanced at the balcony, wondering if he could make it after the Inquisitor.

Then, two more Harlequins descended from the rafters above.

“Asha!” Josephine squeaked.

Asha supposed the sight was more than enough to give the Ambassador palpitations: the Inquisitor dragging the unconscious, bloody body of the Duchess of Lydes by her ludicrous mantle up the steps back towards the Winter Palace. Blood poured from fresh wounds in her shoulder and side, made by what she thought might be poisoned daggers. Florianne’s sleeves were ice crusted, and muscles in her jaw and shoulders were still twitching with the energy of the static cage that had felled her. 

The doors to the palace had been flung open, light spilling out across the courtyard. Already, masked faces were pressed up against the windows, drinking in the fresh scandal. Asha was too exhausted and aching to care. Inquisition soldiers and Imperial guards rushed up to meet her, as she tiredly dropped Florianne’s body with an unceremonious thump onto the cobbles. Josephine, Leliana, Briala, and Gaspard were all watching, so she fought the urge to spit on the body, open a rift, and just kick it in.

“She’s not dead,” she announced, thinking this might be useful information. Then, she turned to Gaspard. “The Inquisition claims your sister as its prisoner: we need to question her about the Elder One’s plans.”

“I - of course, Inquisitor,” said Gaspard, sounding a little shell-shocked.

“We will take the prisoner into our custody, but will of course await the Empress’ permission before extraditing her,” Leliana added smoothly. Asha felt a rush of relief that, had she not been in Orlais, would’ve resulted in her bonelessly flopping to the floor. 

Celene was alive. 

She’d had no idea if she’d managed to get that barrier up in time, and she knew it had been an extremely close thing. She’d thought Florianne fled because her task was already complete.

“Then let’s go see Celene,” she said, not caring that it was a massive breach of etiquette to refer to her by her first name. She walked up the steps barefoot. One shoe heel had snapped, so she’d just discarded the both of them in a hedge somewhere. 

Briala said, “Inquisitor, you are clearly injured, and Her Majesty has suffered a shock-”

“ _Now._ ” Asha said, her voice hard. As much as she wanted to go crash in a bed and be thoroughly unconscious while seven healers worked on her body, she knew how Orlais worked. Even waiting a few hours could give time for Briala to move against the weakened Empress, or allow Gaspard to flee.

Celene was in an antechamber with Morrigan and three Crownsguard, stretched out looking wan on a chaise longue. Her mask was pulled off her face, her silvery eyelashes fluttering against snow pale skin. The Empress’ arcane advisor took one look at the Inquisitor and walked over, placing a hand on her arm and sending a jolt of healing magic through her. It was another temporary solution that would have to serve.

The negotiation that followed was terse, but efficient. Florianne’s crazed theatricality had meant that every single one of the contenders for the throne had been attacked by harlequins in the ballroom, and they had heard Cullen’s command for the Inquisition to protect them all personally. 

_By the end of this week, you will have three very powerful people who all owe you their lives. Make sure they are aware of it._ Asha wondered if Solas would be impressed by how much she’d taken his advice to heart. 

Admittedly, the blackmail that Leliana laid out in her calm, congenial voice also proved very persuasive.

“Asha, we must get you to a healer,” Josephine whispered an hour and a half later, as they left the room. By which Asha thought she meant, ‘you have now bled far too much on the floors of the Winter Palace’. She was starting to feel woozy - she’d had to pass on the rest of the negotiations to the Nightingale while acting for all the world (and to the credulity of nobody) like it wasn’t because she was about to pass out. Leliana had stayed behind, to push their advantage and hammer out a treaty.

“Not yet,” she muttered. It was late enough that the halls of Halamshiral were now empty of guests, only populated by Inquisition and Imperial soldiers. “There were Venatori working independently of Florianne - here on her orders and invitation, but clearly working towards their own goals. It’s what took me so long to get back to the ballroom. I’ll need Cullen to get some troops together and do a sweep of the grounds, before they all flee-”

“Oh,” Josie said, a small, wounded and concerned noise that made Asha pause. “Oh my goodness. No one told you. There was no time-”

“No one told me... what?”

“Cullen… he was stabbed, by a harlequin, as he protected the Empress.” Josie said, her voice shaking. As all the remaining blood drained from Asha’s face, the ambassador hurriedly grabbed her arm before she could sway, “he’s fine! I mean, he _was_ stabbed, and the blade _was_ poisoned, but a healer got to him in bare minutes. It shouldn’t prove fatal. He was still conscious when we left him to find you-”

“Take me to him,” Asha demanded, “ _now._ ”

Asha strode - well, she limped, but with extreme purpose - out of the Winter Palace and down the large expansive road to the Western edge of the grounds. Josephine scurried along beside her, the light mist of rain frizzing her dark hair. “I really, really think we should get a stretcher,” the Ambassador said, looking at the damp trail of muck and blood Asha was picking up on her dress train. “Or a carriage, at least. You are very much... not ok.”

“The healers are with Cullen, right?” Asha replied, in a voice that suggested her feelings regarding if that was not the case, “two birds, one stone.”

Although being barefoot didn’t much matter to her as an elf, walking still hurt badly. But it would’ve taken longer to wait for transportation, and Asha wouldn't countenance even a minute's delay. Their residence was less than ten minutes away on foot - it was just socially unacceptable to walk places, if you weren't a servant or commoner.

Asha burst through the doors to their residences. Ellana was sat on the stairs, head in her hands. She immediately scrambled to her feet, pale face showing visible relief, which shifted to concern as she saw exactly what state her sister was in. “Ash, Creators be praised…”

Dorian had been sitting next to her sister on the stair, and he sighed, “my word. Well, if people thought you were hedgewitch before-”

“Where is he?” Asha demanded.

“I - you mean... Cullen?” Dorian said, confused. “He’s upstairs… are you _bleeding?_ ”

Heart hammering, she pushed past both of them, making a disgusted noise at her filthy skirts as they caught around her feet. She shoved them up and over one arm as she scrambled upwards. The commotion caused the Inquisition to peek blearily out from behind their doors, which was helpful, because it helped her to isolate which one was serving as the infirmary - their makeshift war room, hidden at the top of the house for nefarious planning purposes. Predictably, it was at the end of the long corridor. She couldn’t stop herself - gods, even her _wounds_ couldn’t stop her - from running the final stretch full pelt, and slamming through the closed door at the far end.

Their meeting table had been pushed against a far wall. Three beds were dragged into its place, scuff marks visible on the doorframe and expensive tiled floor. Solas and five individuals in Inquisition uniforms were moving between the beds: in one was Sera, scowling as someone picked grit out from a nasty looking wound across one side of her face; in the next was Sidonie Hawke, laughing with Varric and Isabela as a healer tended to her bared knee, which seemed lumpy in a rather unpleasantly angled way.

And in the third was Cullen, shirtless and clearly very uncomfortable about it. There were lots of wary looks in Isabela’s direction. Fresh bandages were wrapped across his left hand side - the side he would normally have covered by his shield in combat.

Despite Josie being probably the most trustworthy person Asha knew, the unbridled _relief_ at seeing him awake and conscious enough to be his normal awkward self, exactly as the Ambassador had promised, hit her with bodily force. She put her arm against the doorframe, breathing heavily, as Solas strode towards her, taking in her extremely bedraggled, filthy state.

“Asha, are you-”

“You got _stabbed!_ ” Asha cried, aware her voice sounded just a little harried, as every head in the room swivelled towards her and she ran towards Cullen’s bed, “what kind of army Commander gets _stabbed?_ ”

Cullen blinked up at her, very startled to see her in front of him. “Um, many, I imagine. In battle. If they’re doing their jobs.”

“Not if they’re doing it _correctly_. You’re supposed to be better at this than me! How are you not wearing armour?”

“... _You’re_ not wearing armour!”

“I’m a mage and I’m in a _dress!_ ” she retorted, “what’s your excuse? Couldn’t sneak some leather under there? The uniform covers everything! You’re so fucking _careful_ all the time! It’s not like owning a fancy half cape will protect you from getting stabbed!”

“Andraste preserve me. Am I _ever_ going to hear the end of that cape?”

“I just-” she was horrified to hear herself let out a snivel, abruptly wiping a hand across her face and making sure she wasn’t actually tearing up, “are you ok? I just went straight after Florianne - I thought you could take care of yourself!”

“I-” his expression softened as he began to comprehend just why she was yelling at him. “Inquisitor, you will perhaps note that I am alive and breathing. I 'took care' of myself perfectly well. Going after Florianne was the correct decision - I mean, presuming you caught her. ”

“Of course I did! What do you take me for?” Asha said, offended that he even had to ask.

He grinned, almost despite himself, "I wouldn't expect anything less. And that means your strategy was sound."

“But… but… you got _stabbed_.”

“Yes, and you once threw yourself at a dragon on the off-chance it would cause a distraction. Glad to see your risks continue to pay off.”

She was standing at the edge of his bed, feeling a bit at a loose end now that she’d verified he wasn’t fatally wounded. She hadn't realised quite how much her body was getting by on there being a continual sense of urgency. The world was starting to tip a bit.

“D-did it hurt?”

Cullen gave her a flat look, “Asha, that is an absurd question. Of course it hurt.”

“Was the dagger poisoned? Josephine said it was poisoned.”

“Yes, it was poisoned,” he confirmed, “but after you reported seeing the Harlequin yesterday, we made sure our healers had brewed antidotes to their commonly used formulas. They had them on on-hand, in case something like this happened.”

“So you’re… ok now?”

“We bought a rather large number of medics with us. They’ve already dealt with the internal damage. Now I just have to rest up, and wait for the healing potions to start taking effect.”

“Those don’t contain lyrium, by the way,” she told him, off-hand. “I checked.”

“You did? That was... thoughtful of you.”

“You’re definitely ok? There’s not going to be like… a second wave of poison? Is it going to… spike? ...I don’t really know how poisons work.”

“Asha, I can confirm that I am completely fine,” he told her. Normally, she would’ve expected exasperation in his voice, but his response was… calm, even though he was looking at her strangely.

“Oh! And we’re doing fine too, by the way!” Sid shouted from behind Asha’s shoulder.

“Hush, love, let them have their moment.” Isabela murmured.

“Good,” Asha murmured, putting a hand to her temple as the last dregs of adrenaline seeped from her. “...Good. I just… I really, really didn’t want you to die.”

She hadn’t really meant to say that aloud - although she supposed it wasn’t very incriminating, as there were all sorts of reasons not to want someone dead. But suddenly, thinking along those lines, she realised that the last time they’d spoken together, just the two of them, it had been in the darkened room, hiding from the Veluns. And he was currently shirtless, and also becoming conscious of that fact - if only because she was, it seemed, just outright staring. Under her gaze, this adorable, embarrassed flush began over just the crests of his shoulders and she thought - _huh, at least we’d be matched in that regard_. She blushed everywhere too.

Cullen was looking increasingly concerned, to the point where she was incredibly worried that she’d said all of that out loud. She didn't think she had, had she? “Is there anything I can do?” she asked him hastily, placing her hand on the bed post as the world swayed slightly. “To help you recover? Can I get you anything? Is there anything you need? Would you like chocolate? I think I have some chocolate in my room.”

“Um, Inquisitor, I really think you should just-”

And that was when Asha blacked out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊
> 
> No chapter notes here, really. More Wicked Eyes, Wicked Hearts in next week's instalment!


	68. Chapter Sixty-Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts, part 5

It was a testament to Orlesian politics, as well as just how many healers the Inquisition had covertly brought with them to Halamshiral, that less than twenty-four hours later Asha once more found herself, standing in a dress, in the Winter Palace ballroom.

Much like Asha herself, Halamshiral had been scrubbed clean of blood, and that was what passed as presentable in these trying times. Apart from the fact that all the ball staff were now Celene's underlings rather than Florianne's, it was almost as if the attack had never happened. Although it seemed a few people had decided to skip the final day of the ball, the majority were still in attendance, as if a murderous coup had simply been a part of the preordained programme.

This was, Leliana explained, why they’d bought so many healers in their retinue. The Nightingale had anticipated at least one covert assassination attempt, practically as part of Orlesian tradition, and had known they would have to have Asha back on her feet and apparently unconcerned by the next evening - if they ever wanted anyone here to take the Inquisition seriously.

As it was, the arrow wound and the shade bite were both still healing, and had left a shiny, red impression like a watermark on her shoulder. There were several, silvery incisions around the arrow wound, where they’d reopened her skin to prize the metal arrowhead out. Thankfully, Asha had been unconscious for all of it. The healers had worked on her throughout the night.

She’d woken up groggy in her bed, late midday sun slanting through her window. Both Ellana and Cass, looking tense but at least like they’d slept, had been drinking tea in the two parlour chairs at the other end of her room. Both rushed over to her when she started making tentative noises to signal she was awake.

“Mythal’s tits, _asa’ma’lin_ ,” Ellana said, after enthusiastic hugs had been submitted to and Asha had shown that she was in fact completely fine, “you made a fucking mess of that beautiful dress.”

“You should’ve seen Florianne and her stupid mantle,” Asha muttered, pushing herself up with only a small wince, and gesturing to show she also wanted tea. “I almost ripped the bastard thing from her shoulders.”

“You were also… kind of a badass.”

“ _Kind of?!_ ”

“Ok, ok, very much so. But I do also think Vivienne had an aneurysm.”

“It will be interesting to see how the Court reacts, tonight,” Cassandra mused, “it is very rare in Orlais for violence to take place in the open.”

“They literally have two war fronts, and murder alienage elves as a national sport,” Asha said dismissively. “The _shem_ can cope.”

Ellana cast a knowing look at her sister, that immediately made Asha nervous. “I’m sure Cullen will protect her from any dissenters,” she said, loudly, “he’ll be taking his job _very_ seriously, after the dressing down he received, before she faceplanted onto his naked chest.”

“ _Fenedhis_ ,” Asha said, rubbing a hand through her unwashed and now quite crusty hair, “I didn’t, did I?”

And then she froze up, sifting through the memories of her conduct. She’d rampaged through the palace grounds covered in blood, trying to find Cullen and make sure he was ok. And then she’d offered him chocolate. She supposed she hadn’t been… _particularly_ subtle.

Ellana froze too, watching Asha while she tried to cover up the telling silence that followed with a large, hefty sip of her tea. She could feel herself blushing.

“Holy… fucking… Mythal… and all her _fucking host_ ,” Ellana said, mouth agape, “you... you _do_ like him!”

Asha closed her eyes, fortifying herself against the tidal wave of many, many regrets. Again, the pause was too long not to condemn her.

Ellana was stuttering. “How - you - how - _you said you weren’t interested in him when I asked you!_ ”

Cass hushed her, looking warily at the door. Asha was grateful, though she wasn't sure it mattered. At that pitch, it was pretty certain only _dogs_ could hear her sister.

“I know,” she muttered, mournfully, looking into the bottom of her cup like she wanted to drown herself. “I wasn’t, then. Well. Maybe I was. A little. It was after we played chess. So maybe. I think?”

“How the fuck did you keep this a secret from me??!” Ellana shrieked, “you _never_ keep secrets from me! You never fucking _can_!”

“I’m sorry,” Asha said. “I didn’t want to tell you, in case it made things awkward.”

“You already make everything so fucking awkward I want to scream!” Ellana replied, a little hysterical, “We _all_ had to watch that fucking hug! You... you _knew_ already?! I thought you were just being _dense_! I didn't want to muscle in until you'd worked it all out for yourself. Holy fucking Mythal... all this time... why would you telling me make things _worse?_ ”

“Because… well...” Asha decided that she was now in too deep to avoid baring her soul. “I know he clearly likes _you_.”

It was at that pronouncement that Cassandra - who had adopted the strategy of sipping silently from her cup while the drama unfolded - promptly choked.

Then, she began coughing and sputtering tea all over Asha’s bedsheets.

If anything, Ellana looked more horrified than she had before. “Ooooooh,” she murmured, thunderstruck, “oooooh, _asa’malin_.”

Cassandra was having difficulty breathing.

“I know,” Asha said forlornly. “I’m a terrible person. I’m so sorry.”

“Oooh no, no no no no, Ash,” Ellana said. She leant in. “It’s not that. It’s more just... Cullen very much does _not_ like me.”

Asha blinked at her. “Yes, he does.”

“No. He really, _really_ doesn’t.”

“I think…” Cassandra gasped, pounding her chest, “his affections… might be engaged… elsewhere.”

“But… but he’s nice to you. All the time. And men who are nice to you _always_ fancy you.”

“Um-”

“I know that's not how things work, as a general rule. I mean in the case of _you_ specifically. They open a door for you or pick up something you dropped or whatever, and it always ends in a proposal.”

“And there was no other possible motive you could think of? ...No other reason he might want me to approve of him?”

“I mean, I suppose he’s very nice, generally-” Asha looked confused as both woman groaned aloud. “...What do you mean, ‘his affections might be engaged elsewhere’? Oh Creators, is he gay? Isabela didn’t seem to think he was gay.”

 _He certainly didn’t seem gay to me, when we were hiding from the Veluns,_ she thought. But then, the Chantry did breed repression...

“ _Fen’harel ver na_ ,” Ellana put her head in her hands on the side of the bed. “So you _were_ being dense - just in ways I never could've imagined. This is my fault, really. I knew you were hopeless, but I’d forgotten how much so.”

“He. Likes. You. You. _Fool_ ,” Cassandra said, extreme frustration underlying every syllable - the impact only partially marred by her now sore throat.

Asha froze, falling silent as the Seeker stood up, began to pace, and continued, “he has done, for months. Probably since Haven.”

“Oh.” Maybe it was the after effects of all the healing magic, but the words were not quite sinking in, “but… but... I was horrible to him in Haven.”

“Yes. And he took that to heart, and he’s also a born-again martyr, so he’s decided for himself that there’s no hope. Only, apparently,” Cass’ threw up an exasperated hand in her direction, “there is.”

Asha felt stunned, as several memories converged on her at once: standing awkwardly close to him in the war tent in Adamant and curing his insomnia. Watching his face while he played chess and accidentally catching him watching her in turn. Perching on his chest with her sword at his throat, shouting at him.

_Creators._

“But I’m… I’m a _mage_!”

“He doesn’t care, _asa’malin_ ,” Ellana sighed. “I mean, you probably care he’s a templar but-”

“Of course I care that he’s a templar!” Asha hissed back.

“But you like him anyway?”

Asha fell silent, before saying. “...I’m not exactly overjoyed about it, honestly.”

“I suppose you could just… stop?”

“...I… I don’t think I can. I’ve really been trying.”

“Holy… _fucking_ … Mythal.” That came out with an edge of a squeal. Asha blinked again, as Ellana beamed at her excitedly.

That was when it actually sunk in: they thought Cullen fancied her back.

But she’d also just informed Ellana, little sister and matchmaker extraordinaire, about one of her crushes. Again.

As if hearing her thoughts, Asha caught Ellana’s looking up at her as they descended into the ballroom one final time. El waggled her eyebrows meaningfully. It seemed she had… _plans_.

Asha felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. If what Cass and Ellana was saying was true - she wasn’t entirely convinced, but Cass _was_ Cullen’s best friend, she really did know him best - then this made things even more complicated, not easier. Ellana might get carried away by Halamshiral’s atmosphere and want to force the two of them into a fairytale ending, but that didn’t mean they’d… fit.

Asha was running out of excuses not to act, but that brought up the scariest question of all: what exactly was it that she wanted to do?

 _I’ll just find Sebastian Vael and throw him to Ellana as a distraction._ She thought this had all the makings of a solid plan. Evasion was the only way forward.

Why did everything feel so much more dangerous, after all the danger had passed?

Asha supposed that now, more than ever, the court’s eyes followed her wherever she went. The nobility watched in anticipation of whatever the savagely murderous Dalish apostate would do next. The dress didn’t help matters much - all her recently acquired scars (bar one, age-old) were on display. This final dress was made of layers upon layers of diaphanous fabric in various shades of green. The top layer, bright emerald, was then overlaid with silken embroidered leaves and golden flowers that climbed up the bodice and cinched it at both sides, like a picture frame for her silhouette. More stylised leaves and vines tumbled across the skirts. Everything was green and gold: Lavellan’s colours. It was very Dalish - or at least, what Orlais thought the Dalish were.

There also just wasn’t that much of it. There’d been an expectation that Asha might have more time and perhaps want to change before confronting any assassins, so the whole thing was very lightweight and easy to get rid of with the buttons that held it together at the sides. There were no sleeves, just a cape hastily pinned in place. Her hair was pinned back enough to show her undercut, but otherwise left loose. But there wasn’t going to be a confrontation now. So she was just left in a revealing, easily deconstructed gown, with everyone watching. Waiting for her to… she didn’t know.

Summon demons? Claim the throne of Orlais for her own? Kiss Cullen Rutherford full on the mouth in full view the entire Inquisition and all of his adoring fans?

“Are you ok?” came a voice from her other side, and Asha jumped out of her fucking skin to see Cullen standing there, as if summoned by her wayward thoughts. In truth, she’d hesitated just a moment too long on the stairs.

“Nothing!” she squeaked, then realised that wasn’t the answer to the question he’d been asking. “Sorry,” she hastily backtracked when he raised an amused eyebrow at her, “it’s just… in all our plans for this fucking thing, did any of us think we’d _really_ be ending it with a night off?”

“It is _not_ a night off,” Vivienne said darkly, putting a hand on Asha's shoulder to give her a discrete, but not gentle, shove down the stairs. “We are going to try and make it to the finish line with a smidgen of decorum, my dear Inquisitor, so that people don’t think you’ve sacrificed the heart of the Duchess of Lydes to your heathen gods.”

“Speak for yourself,” Isabela piped up from somewhere near the back. “I plan to get everyone _very_ drunk, and if any heart-eating elven gods want to join in the merriment, they’re more than welcome.”

“Hasn’t that been your plan for this whole week?” Sid asked. “You were definitely a little tiddly when you fought that harlequin.”

“Honestly, Vivienne, I’m not even sure my gods would have her,” Asha finished her descent into the room, to see Celene, Gaspard, and even Briala, half shrouded by shadow, watching them all from on high. Asha noted with smug satisfaction that they all looked _very_ tired, possibly even more so than her. When she smiled up at them fiercely she was pleased to see Gaspard blanch a little behind his mask.

Cullen noticed too, and leant down to whisper in her ear, “I do believe that man is a little afraid of you.”

“Good.” Asha tried to ignore the way his breath tickled. True to Ellana’s prediction, Cullen was currently refusing to leave her side, having muttered darkly about her ‘lack of armour’. If that was his _only_ comment on her current dress, his professionalism was the reason he was standing so close to her now, Asha was sure. She wouldn’t let herself think otherwise.

She turned to him, “I... what are you wearing?”

Cullen followed her glance down with a small smile, “I was wondering when precisely you’d notice.”

Asha couldn’t exactly explain that she’d been avoiding looking at him for too long because Ellana was watching her every gods-damned move. “But your… your half cape!”

“I… bled rather a lot across my uniform,” he admitted, “Josephine managed to find something for me, last minute.”

He was half-cape-less, dressed not in the Inquisition formal wear but instead in a simple suit: white shirt, dark midnight blue overcoat, tight fitting trousers. The infamous boots, Asha was amused to note, had survived all his harlequin-related trials. “How come you get to wear blue?” she demanded. “I wanted to wear blue! I thought blue was illegal!”

“We hoped we’d get away with it. It looks black, in the light.”

“It’s not very... Orlesian, is it?”

“ _I’m_ not very Orlesian.”

“I’m just saying, if this was truly a last-minute purchase on the last day of the winter's ball in Halamshiral, I would’ve expected you in those adorable poofy sleeves that all the other noblemen have. They would’ve suited you, I’m sure.”

“Just because you wish _you_ were the prettiest person in the room…”

“Oh I do, do I?” she demanded indignantly. In this dress, she was actually pretty certain she was. “Well, the next time you need help fending off your admirers, I’ll just leave you to it, shall I? Send a letter of congratulations in advance to darling little Margot?”

Cullen chuckled, and then, in a move that she thought perhaps surprised them both, he leant down again and murmured, “if you want to hide away in another dark room with me, Inquisitor, you only need ask.”

Asha blinked. Then she blinked again, extremely flustered. He’d delivered the line in a harmless, impartial tone of voice, like he was reporting numbers to her in the war room, but that had definitely been flirting. Hadn’t it?

She glanced over to Ellana, who was glaring at her, looking like she wanted to explode. Yes, it had definitely been flirting. Well, fuck. When had he learnt to flirt? She didn’t think her heart could take it.

Cullen was looking immensely proud, like stunning her silent was some kind of victory. “Court is clearly doing some incredibly dangerous things to your ego, Commander,” she informed him in what she hoped was a level voice to match his own. “Everything about Dorian’s personality is immediately explained.”

Thankfully, Celene then began her speech welcoming everyone to the closing night of the ball, before announcing her truce with Gaspard. Asha had triumphantly snatched the last word from his grasp. 

“Friends, we assembled are the leaders of the Empire,” Gaspard proclaimed, as murmurs rippled across the ballroom. “We must set the example to all of Thedas.”

Asha looked up to where Solas stood on the balcony, already knowing he’d be looking down and watching her. She winked at him, and he smiled and inclined his head in acknowledgement. She’d played the Game and even broken a few of its rules, but she’d gotten what she wanted. She knew the peace she’d brokered wasn’t a perfect solution, but she was never going to be perfect enough for Orlais. And she felt immensely proud to leave her mark on it, all the same.

“The war, and its residual dangers have passed!” Celene cried, to clamours from the nobility, “we herald the arrival of peace! Tonight is the true celebration: let the festivities commence!”

Asha joined in with the applause. When she stopped clapping and the first strings of music began, she turned to find Isabela immediately at her elbow.

“I heard that only a single, homicidal maniac has danced with you all this week, you poor, sweet thing,” the Captain said, with a low courtly bow, “and with you looking like that! It may actually be a crime, and I say that, as a criminal. Let me remedy this immediately, if you would do me the honour?” She smiled suggestively, then glanced innocently around before her eyes landed on Cullen, “unless you are… already engaged?”

Asha hesitated, wondering precisely what Cullen would say.

“I don’t think anyone is foolish enough to stand in the way of what you want, Isabela,” was his slightly amused reply. Asha fought the disappointed slump of her shoulders.

“I find the unrepentant, single-minded pursuit of one’s desires to be an excellent doctrine by which to live a life, Commander,” Isabela said, “you really should try it, sometime.”

And then she whisked Asha out onto the floor.

It was the first in a long series of dances: Sidonie requested her after Isabela, then Varric, then Bull, then Dorian, and even Blackwall, looking a little bashful and not quite meeting her eyes as he did so. Asha would’ve been worried what that meant, had she not been absolutely certain Josie had told him to ask her, given that the only other person he’d danced with all week was the Ambassador herself and people - Josie’s sister chief among them - were beginning to talk. Then there was Cassandra, who insisted on leading, and following her another Nevarran noble, who was quite dashing, although he had quite a large nose. Then one of Celene’s ladies in waiting, who delivered a terse update from the mouth of the still-reigning Empress, and a rather pretty Orlesian woman, who turned out to be truly horrible. Asha realised halfway through that she only wanted to ply her for details of what precisely she’d done to Florianne in the gardens.

“I asked her very nicely not to betray her brother and murder the entire court,” Asha responded woodenly, steering the woman dutifully around the floor.

“Is it true Gaspard has asked to marry you?” the woman asked, “is that why you’re wearing his colours?”

“These are _my_ colours,” Asha retorted. “The colours of Clan Lavellan. I’m wearing them for me.”

This seemed to be scandalous enough for her dance partner to consider it gossip, all the same. Disgusted, Asha broke away as soon as she could, dropping the courtier like her touch burned. She span around and away, into… a chest. A very firm, very white chest.

In front of her was a tall, tanned man with outrageously blue eyes. He was dressed in pristine, ivory white military dress, with a sash of dark blue checked material draped across one of his broad shoulders. More people, allowed to wear blue! Asha was livid! But then she spotted the simple silver diadem nestled on the man's brow, and realised he had royal privilege with which to do so.

“You’re Sebastian Vael!” she blurted, as the man blinked down at her. At his end, it was clear he was also not expecting to be confronted by the Herald of Andraste. He looked almost a little... starstruck. He was maskless and, as Cassandra had promised, _very_ handsome.

Asha decided that Cullen was prettier, though.

“You should dance with my sister!” she told the King of Starkhaven, who had yet to get the chance to speak. She stepped back, and pointed to where Ellana was finishing her dance with Varric, in her own forest green gown. She had golden flowers threaded through her hair, and her cheeks were dusted with some kind of shimmery powder. Even though she hadn’t had a drink yet, Asha thought ‘fuck it’, and added, “I… had a vision! You need to dance with her. It’s Andraste’s will!”

She then hastily strode away from the dance floor before she could have her divine insight questioned, hoping that Vael was as mindlessly devout as Sid thought he was.

She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, careening off in a random direction, but then she saw a server carrying wine that she hadn’t let herself touch any night this week, and she knew.

“Shall I distract Madame de Fer, while you finish that?” came a soft voice from her side, and she looked away from the flute of red wine she was downing, to see Solas standing next to her.

“The woman cannot begrudge me _one glass_.”

“I already know for a fact that’s your second.”

“Alright, smart arse!” Asha grumbled, draining it dry. “Where do you get off being so sneaky? Have you already joined Briala’s network and dedicated yourself to the cause?”

Solas tensed slightly, and she wondered smugly if she’d hit the mark again. He wasn’t quite as good at this as he’d liked to think. But she wouldn’t exactly begrudge him - he’d need a job after this Corypheus business was all over, and she could think of worse uses for his intelligence than fighting elvish oppression in Orlais.

“I am… of course... already servant to a far greater woman, and a far greater cause,” he demurred, a hint of playful sarcasm lining his voice.

“Lucky you,” she sighed, wondering if she could get away with another glass of wine.

“I much prefer working under the current champion of the Grand Game. Is allying Clan Lavellan with Starkhaven merely the makings of your victory lap?”

“Oh shush, you. Ellana has had a crush on him since she was small. He’s a prince, and he might _just_ be pretty enough for her. I can’t help but be a little curious to see what will happen. One of us, at least, should have a love life.”

Asha faltered, realising exactly who she’d said that to, and how collosally stupid she was. She felt Solas’ eyes watching her, no doubt registering her desire to gobble up all those words and erase them from living memory. But she resolutely looked out across the ballroom with Orlesian-levels of nonchalance, like she hadn’t just made a catastrophic accusation.

Of course, with all the timing of a curse, that was the moment Cullen crossed her field of vision, in his stupidly well-cut coat that he’d _definitely_ had on-hand for the off-chance of a wardrobe change, being the secretly vain man that he was. _Last minute purchase, my ass,_ Asha thought, with a small involuntary smile.

“I was… under the impression,” Solas murmured, at her side, as he watched her watch Cullen, “that you might not be entirely… desolate, in regards to that area.”

Well fuck. She knew she hadn’t been subtle, last night. But did everyone suddenly know?

“Gosh, I _might not_ be romantically barren - the exact words anyone wants to hear, from an old flame,” Asha said, trying to recover with a brash snort. “Not that I’m entirely sure you counted. Next, you’ll even tell me I _might not_ be totally hideous.”

“I count, _lethallan_ ,” were the soft words of his reply, the use of the present tense running down her spine like a caress. Then, in elvhen, “ _and you are far from hideous, as you well know_.”

She turned to Solas, wondering what exactly he was trying to pull. He was looking at her intently, in that way he had, before the catastrophic-Fade-tongue-debacle. Dread Wolf take her - maybe there was something in the water in Orlais.

She supposed it _was_ a very nice dress she was wearing.

But, well… that stare just did not affect her, anymore. Not the way that certain hand kisses, and darkened hiding places did. She thought that perhaps Solas had made the right decision, not to compromise their friendship, all those months ago.

She smiled at him gently, patted him on the arm, and said, “enjoy the party, Solas. The hat was... a bold choice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry pals, there's only one chapter this week, and it's a little late. Turns out, that when ya girl finishes her job on Friday and starts her PhD on Monday, she needs some time over the weekend in between to sleep, watch disney movies, and eat ice cream. 
> 
> But hey, that means less of a wait until a normal two chapter weekend next Saturday? And let me tell you now, going back to even-number chapter postings avoids a real bitch of a cliffhanger down the line, so frankly I'm doing y'all a favour ;) xxx


	69. Chapter Sixty-Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts, part 6

Two (three, technically, but she wasn’t about to tell Solas that) glasses of wine in, and Asha thought she might have the courage to approach Cullen. She wondered what would happen if she asked him to dance again. She’d already danced with everyone else in the Inquisition, so there was nothing untoward about it.

 _Don’t be pathetic_ , she told herself sternly, and set about seeking him out.

When she found him, he was talking - of all people - to Morrigan. Celene’s arcane advisor was standing with him and Leliana, dressed in a crimson red gown and smirking lazily, looking thoroughly unconcerned. By comparison, Leliana was as tense as a bowstring, and Cullen just looked uncomfortable, clearly caught in the crossfire between the two women.

“Ahh, Inquisitor,” Morrigan purred, which made Asha’s decision about whether to interrupt for her. “I was just informing your charming... _administrators_... that I will be accompanying you back to Skyhold. As ordered, by Imperial Decree.”

“Oh,” Asha said, “well. We’d be more than happy to have you.”

Leliana made a sound that was close to Cassandra’s disgusted noise. Asha was rather alarmed.

“And I’m also so very _excited_ to accompany you on your grand, noble quest,” Morrigan smiled, knife-bright. “There’s always something so thrilling about watching a mage change the world! I was just saying how much it makes me miss Rose. Don’t you miss Rose, darling Nightingale? So many years apart. I suppose the marital bed grows cold?”

“I’m pretty certain Rose doesn’t miss _you_ ,” Leliana ground out.

Morrigan fingered a silver necklace that lay against the hollow of her throat. “I’m sure you know her best, my dear. Tell me, do you still receive letters, or at this point is it just your scuttling vermin's job to keep track of her?”

“Asha, I actually has something I wanted to discuss with you!” Cullen said. He put his hand on her bare arm, and she tried not to react to it as he hastily pulled her away from the two women. 

“Maker’s breath,” he muttered, depositing them both a safe distance and dropping his hand, “that woman is just as terrifying as I remember.”

“Really? Morrigan? I like her.”

“Yes,” he sighed, “you do rather have a type.”

“Hey!”

He grinned, though it looked a little forced, “struck too close to home, did I?”

“You got me,” she deadpanned. “I feel a kinship with the reviled apostate witch trying to survive in Orlais. I cannot think why. It is possibly entirely down to the corsetry.”

“Oh,” Cullen said, “well. My apologies, then. If you wanted to speak to her, I’ll let you return to the fray, if you’d like? I just didn’t want you becoming new ammunition for those two to fight each other with.”

“No, I appreciate it. I had no idea what I was walking into, honestly." _And you were the reason I was even there in the first place._ "Why do they hate each other so much?”

“From what I can gather? They both had feelings for Rose, and Rose chose Leliana. Or Morrigan chose other things and then Rose chose Leliana? Or Morrigan liked Leliana? I confess that I didn’t know that much about it... until roughly fifteen minutes ago.”

“But you knew Rose, right?”

“I knew her, yes. But that was before everything - before she was the Hero of Ferelden. She was one of my charges, in the Ferelden Circle.”

Asha felt herself grimace reflexively at his words, like she’d tasted something sour. She knew she should fight the reaction but she couldn’t help it. It just felt so… squicky. Cullen noticed, and hastily looked away, and they both took a moment in their talk to acknowledge that he was still an ex-templar.

“...What was she like?” Asha said valiantly, in the hopes of resurrecting the conversation.

“Rose? A heartbreaker. It doesn’t surprise me in the least to learn she has left a trail of very beautiful, very angry women in her wake. It _does_ surprise me that she’s married, however.”

“Maybe it took someone as scary as Leliana to tame the beast,” Asha grinned. “Why, did she break your heart too?”

“Hardly! I was really under no illusion that I was ever her type, Inquisitor,” Cullen said, running a hand awkwardly through his hair. “And aside from the fact that I’m not a woman, she also made my life a routine torture.”

“In what way?” _She was the one living under your guard_.

“I walked in on her, um… _fraternising_ with other female apprentices in the library. A grand total of forty-seven times. In my _first six months_ on the job.”

“Gosh, keeping count, were you? Must’ve been truly torturous.”

“Think as little of me as you want, Inquisitor. But I was seventeen, and literally raised by priests! I was supposed to be keeping order, and I was the only embarrassed one there. I think it got to the point where she started devising more and more compromising positions to be discovered in - I could barely look the woman in the eye by the time it came to her Harrowing!”

Asha imagined awkward baby Cullen, walking in on two grown women in a consensual, adult relationship and trying to get a single sentence out successfully, and threw back her head and laughed. “Oh my gods,” she said through her giggles, “she must’ve ruined you!”

Cullen was grinning back at her, pleased at her reaction. “Yes. My delicate youth, thoroughly corrupted. The Hero of Ferelden was an utter menace. They don’t tell it like that in the ballads.”

Asha snorted, “yes, yes. Poor girl can’t go down on someone in peace, and you’re definitely the victim in that scenario.”

They fell silent at that, laughter dying away. Asha wasn’t sure if it was because she’d made a reference to overtly sexual activity, or because she’d criticised the templars and the Circles. Cullen ran a hand through his hair once more - Asha swore she could hear some courtiers sigh longingly - and she bit her lip, wondering how she could stop the conversation from once again floundering.

“Was there something you… wanted?” Cullen asked, when they were both quiet for just a little too long.

 _I want to dance with you_. Asha tried to say it, but the words didn’t seem to come out.

“No, not really,” she said, finally, “I was just... mingling? Why, am I keeping you from anything? Was there something you... wanted to do?”

_Cassandra and Ellana says he likes me. He flirted with me. Maybe he will…_

“No, not really.” he said, crushing Asha’s hopes. “I am... glad for your company, though.”

Suddenly, Asha felt an unexpected and firm hand on her shoulder. “Ashatarsylnin, my dear,” said Vivienne, digging her nails in, “may I have a word?”

Asha began to feel uneasy when Vivienne pulled her through the Vestibule, into a quiet corner at the very edge of what was considered within guests’ visiting limits. She supposed that both Celene and Gaspard knew she’d rifled unceremoniously through their private residences at this point, but still, it was a surprising move from her etiquette tutor.

“What, precisely, are you doing, my dear?” the First Enchanter asked her, voice cracking like a whip.

“Look, I know I should’ve probably dodged out of dancing with that awful woman with a little more decorum, but she was fishing for gossip. _You_ would’ve just iced her.”

“My dear, my hopes of you ever demonstrating politeness rather died a death when you presented Florianne’s mangled corpse to the Grand Ballroom. Like a cat dragging in its latest prize, and hoping to be praised by its owner,” said Vivienne. “I mean, what on this Maker-blessed earth are you doing, in regards to our Commander?”

“I - you - you want to talk to me about _Cullen?_ ” Asha asked, horrified. Gods, she really, really shouldn't have checked on him in the infirmary. She should've kept this a secret to her dying breath. She really couldn’t imagine someone she wanted to gossip over her templar-crush with less, short of Deshanna being resurrected from the grave and then interrogating her over all her terrible life choices.

“Yes. What exactly are you planning on doing with him?”

“I - I would’ve thought it was rather beneath you to dirty yourself with my love life, Vivienne.” 

“Thank the Maker - you’re finally acknowledging it’s your ‘love life’, then,” the woman murmured, looking a little relieved. “Yes. I too had rather hoped these days were behind me. The pains of wading through veritable cesspits of hormones and watching children moon over each other without any qualifying influence from the outside world was half the reason I stopped living in the Circle in the first place. But you were the ones insisting on conducting your awkward little dance in public, so I thought it best to intervene before all of Orlais knows what you want, even if you have yet to figure it out for yourself.”

“I really don’t give a fuck what Orlais thinks, Vivienne.”

“Yes, I am well aware. Then, let us say I was suffering from an extreme case of extreme second-hand embarrassment, and simply had to make it stop. But that doesn’t change my question. What are you doing, my dear? What, precisely, is it that you want?”

“I don’t see why it’s any of your business!”

“I am a part of your organisation. I have a stake in its continual, unimpeded function. I am a friend of the Commander’s, and mostly, I get bored of witnessing competent women playing childish games and thinking it endearing.”

Asha wondered if she’d ever recover from the shock of hearing Vivienne call her ‘competent’. “Well... no one’s asking you to stay here and watch them!” 

“So defensive, my dear. I must’ve struck a nerve. And you still haven’t answered me.”

“I- I-”

“ _What do you want?_ ”

“I don’t know!” Asha retorted, her temper fraying. “...Not a templar!”

They both fell silent at her admission. Asha was a little shocked by it. She’d known her feelings, of course, but it was a whole other thing to say them aloud. They sounded harsh. And unfair.

“Cullen Rutherford isn’t a templar, my dear.” Vivienne pointed out, in a tone that was almost gentle, by her standards.

 _Yes he is_ , Asha thought, and opened her mouth to say it. He might not still work for the Order, but he had a fanatical past, and funny stories about the women he used to guard in Circles. If it ever came down to it, she was half-certain he could Silence her. 

But he was also someone who hated his past, who’d apologised to her multiple times for his conduct when it wasn't even against her, who’d taught her how to fight templars and who… she was pretty sure she trusted with her life.

“I know.” Asha said, finally, “but I think he might be too close to one. For anything to ever… work between us.”

“Ahh, it’s all decided then. Before you’ve even asked him,” Vivienne said, calmly. “And how many nights have you spent awake using that argument against yourself, Ashatarsylnin? How many nights has it worked?”

“I…” Asha hesitated, “I’m doing fine. I know I have… feelings, but I won’t act on them, and eventually they’ll go away. I won’t do this to myself. I... I _can’t_.”

They both fell silent again, until Vivienne spoke.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like, to be a woman in the Circle, Ashatarsylnin?”

Asha squinted up at her, confused. _Of course I don’t_ , she thought, _I’m not sure you do either._

Vivienne must’ve read the disdain plainly on Asha’s face, but she continued in a level voice. “Desire is… a difficult thing to navigate,” she said. “You are under constant surveillance. Nothing is private, and so every revelation you have about yourself, several hundred people have it with you. Half of what you want to do is forbidden, the other half will earn you derision. If you fall in love with a mage and it brings you happiness, your connection will be resented by everyone around you. If you fall in love with someone outside of the Circle, as I did, you will have to fight tooth and claw at every turn to keep them - and I of course was lucky, because I happened to fall in love with a very wealthy man who could afford to keep me. And if you fall in love with a templar…”

“That’s a product of desperation,” Asha muttered.

“Yes, yes. Absolutely everyone will make you feel guilty about it! You’ll hate yourself at every turn. Even if you’ve learned to only love safety, and know exactly who and what will make you safe. Even if you grew up in the same village, and she kissed you on your sixth birthday before your connection to the Fade manifested, then joined the Order so as to follow you wherever you go. Even if you just liked… the way he wears a suit of armour.” Vivienne quirked an eyebrow, as Asha blushed, “I have watched people stew in their own self-hatred, simply because they wanted things. Because we are taught, as mages, that wanting anything, even the comfort you can find in a small, confined life, is wrong. You know who never suffers any such guilt? The people who we love. They never understand what vulnerability costs us, as mages.

“You, on the other hand,” she said, “ _you_ have found a man who is aware of every reason of how what you want - what you really want, deep down - could be interpreted as wrong. A man who is so desperately trying to not take advantage of a hold he doesn’t even have over you - given that you met as adults, in a situation where _you_ have power over _him_ \- that he will never make the first move.”

Asha fidgeted, “...I’m really not sure where this is going.”

“You are not and never have been a Circle mage, Ashatarsylnin. You are, in this world of Free Mages, possibly the one with the most autonomy and power in all of Thedas.”

“...And yet I still want to be with a templar?”

“And yet you still refuse to go after _what you actually want_ ,” Vivienne replied impatiently. “You spend your every waking moment stewing in indecision, guilt, and judgement you imagine other people feel, when really we’d all have enjoyed it much more if you’d just bedded Rutherford at the Adamant campsite, without being subjected to these months of endless torture, watching the both of you court like sexually-repressed fifteen year olds. You’re not being watched inside a Circle tower. No one gives a flying fuck about your love life, my dear. But you insist on using us as obstacles in it. It’s _exasperating_.”

“I… I didn’t like him, when we were in Adamant.” At this point, it was all Asha could think to say.

“Sure, you didn’t.” Vivienne said, the words dripping with disdain. 

“You don’t understand! I was _tranquil_. Templars made me _tranquil_. I can’t just-” 

Sleep with one. Love one. 

“...Was the Commander among the perpetrators of the Clan Lavellan Massacre?”

“Now you’re just being fucking obtuse.”

“Bastien is a nobleman. He oversaw the tithing of children within his territories to the Circles. He didn’t hate mages, but he probably never really gave them a second thought before I showed up,” Vivienne said. “In the first month of our relationship, while I was still struggling to establish myself, I was reliant on him for my money, my accommodation, my freedom to leave the tower, my ability to go out on the street unmolested. He had more power over me than Rutherford will ever have over you. I still loved him.”

“But… _why?_ That sounds terrible.”

“And that’s your problem, Inquisitor,” Vivienne said, as her demeanour began to ice over once more, until all the was left was her brutal sincerity. “Why did I love him? Because, quite frankly, I wanted to. I let myself. I decided to stop being a fucking martyr about it, and I let myself be happy. Nobody’s situation in life is perfect. Nobody arrives to you without flaws. I saw a man I knew I wanted, decided I didn’t give a fuck what anyone else thought about it, and then I took him. I had him within a single night, and he’s spent the rest of his life fighting for me. You, meanwhile, were rejected by a homeless apostate and didn’t put up anything even resembling a struggle, and you’ve then spent half a year dithering over your ethical quandaries, still _very much not getting laid_. You’ve not fallen in love with _Corypheus_ , dear. And you’re certainly not the first mage to fancy a pretty templar, so stop acting like it.”

Vivienne let out a heavy sigh, shaking out her tense shoulders until her posture was once more glacially graceful. She licked the tip of her thumb, absently smoothed down one of her eyebrows, and gave Asha a haughty look. 

“What I wouldn’t give, Ashatarsylnin, to see a little bravery from you,” she said, calmly, as if Asha hadn’t killed Nightmare, in the spring. “Decide what _you_ want. Not what the Rebel Mages want. Or your dead mentor. Or what you think the Chantry are secretly trying to entrap you into, using a pair of pretty eyes. And for the love of the Maker, do be quick about it. It’s all getting rather painful to watch.”

Asha reentered the ballroom in a daze. She felt like Vivienne had taken her Enchanter’s staff in hand, and started beating her repeatedly with it. The speech had been a mess, as pep talks went, and the motivational equivalent to being dragged across a pit of nails. If Madame de Fer told her to do something, Asha’s initial instinct was very much _to not do it._

She thought of Cullen’s breath, stirring her hair as he’d leant down to talk to her, earlier that night. She thought about the hollowness in her chest, when she’d thought he was hurt. She thought all the way back to the hopeful smile he’d given her during that first game of chess, when he’d desperately wanted her to tell him that she liked him enough to be friends, and instead she’d asked him how many people he’d turned tranquil.

She thought of how Ellana had squealed, when Asha admitted how she felt. Normally, the prospect of any handsome man would’ve elicited such a response from her sister - but Ellana was like her. She knew what it meant, for Asha to like Cullen, and for Cullen to be templar. 

She’d still squealed.

Was this…? Asha didn’t know what this was. 

Or she absolutely did, and Vivienne was right - she was too cowardly to act on it.

Asha barrelled through the crowd without seeing who she was brushing past, making a beeline for a set of doors that led onto the empty balcony. She walked over to the railing and collapsed against it, head in her hands, as the arriving winter’s breeze buffeted through her flimsy dress and raised gooseflesh on her arms. She was _tired_. She fucking hated Orlais. She’d be glad to be gone by morning.

She collapsed into the silence, and didn’t hear anyone approach. 

Which was why she jumped a mile when soft velvet was gently draped over her shoulders.

“Mythal’s _fucking_ tits!” she cried, startling back and swinging around.

Cullen stood there, looking jacketless and rather guilty. She hastily tugged his coat back onto her shoulders before her flailing caused it to slide completely off. It would probably slip over the balcony into the gardens below, knowing her luck.

“So… um… talking to Madame de Fer went about as well as it usually does, then?” he asked, looking awkward. “I probably should’ve led with that, _before_ giving you the jacket. But it’s bloody cold out here.”

She pulled the collar closer around herself. “Thanks. Sorry for screaming at you.”

He smiled, “all part of the course, really, Inquisitor. At least I’m not recovering from a stab wound this time.”

“I… still feel like that was rather incompetent of you.”

“Imagine how _I_ felt, when you abruptly collapsed on me, and I discovered that you too had been _very much stabbed_.”

“I was definitely only _cut_ by those daggers,” Asha hastily stressed. “The arrow, however, I will begrudgingly acknowledge. I really should’ve been barriered at the time.”

“Your benevolence never fails to stun.”

“Sorry,” she said, again. “And yes, Vivienne gave me quite the dressing down. Shockingly, she still doesn’t like me very much.”

“Really? And here I thought your display of elegance and dignity against the Duchess of Lydes would likely move her to tears.”

“Hey! You remember some of _your_ proposed solutions to our diplomatic missions, don’t you? The ones that involve throwing swords at the problem?”

“The Inquisition’s army has adapted to handle many situations,” he deadpanned, and Asha laughed so hard she snorted. Cullen looked exceedingly pleased again. She’d never noticed how much he always wanted to make her laugh.

Inside, the chords of another song began. It was getting late. Asha wondered just how many dances they’d have left before the Winter Ball ended.

“Why did you follow me out here?” she asked, genuinely curious. “Other than to check I hadn’t murdered the First Enchanter in cold blood, of course.”

“I…” he coughed, “actually, I wanted to ask you something.”

Immediately, her heart started hammering in her chest, in a way that was frankly embarrassing. Honestly. He could’ve been wanting to check what the time was, or what breakfast she wanted tomorrow morning, as he was putting an order in. “Oh?” she said, tentatively. “Ask away.”

“Um,” he glanced around the empty balcony, then back at her, “I wanted to ask... may I have this next dance, my lady?”

He delivered a courtly bow - the kind he had never once given her during dance practice - and extended his hand out to her, upturned face fighting to hide its uncertainty. Asha felt a jolt of nerves up her spine, the same nervousness that he probably felt, but with a fizzling afterburn, like sparkling wine. 

“In the ballroom?” she squeaked, wondering why he was bowing here. “I thought you didn’t dance?”

“No, um, not in the ballroom,” he said, straightening, and shivering a little clothed in just his shirt. “I… well... you’ll understand in a minute. Do you want to dance or not?”

“Sure!” she said, “absolutely! Of course!”

Cullen beamed and Asha was proud that her fingers didn’t tremble as she reached out and took his offered hand. He stroked his thumb lightly over the knuckles almost reflexively - gods, was it possible to combust from such a small thing? He wasn’t wearing the stupid halla-dilation gloves this evening - and then he pulled her in close.

Much closer than she was expecting. She blinked a couple of times, stunned, as he arranged her body into a Dalish hold. He adjusted the jacket carefully on her shoulders. Then - and this was something Asha noticed, with heartbreaking certainty as to the reason why - he settled his other hand on her hip, rather than anywhere on her back, where it would usually be placed. 

The music carried through, only slightly dampened by the howl of the wind, and then he began to dance with her.

“This is Dalish dancing,” she said, intelligently, after a few moments passed.

“Evidently,” he said, with an amused smile at her expense. “I - um - I asked Ellana to teach me. Not that it took long, of course. It’s just dancing. With different arms.”

“‘With different arms.’” Asha echoed, not about to let that one slide. “Years. Nay, _centuries_ of my people’s culture. Reduced to, ‘with different arms’. You and Cole should compose poetry together.”

“Alright, Inquisitor,” he huffed, moving in closer so that his cheek brushed against hers and she could feel the heat of him, frankly everywhere. She wondered if he’d worked out that this would prove a pretty effective way to shut her up, as her mind reeled and she wondered why he still smelt so nice when his ribs were no longer broken. “Let’s just try to enjoy the nice thing I’ve done for you, and you can resume teasing me once the song is over.”

“But our agreement at the party after Adamant was-”

“ _Asha_.”

She fell silent, but that made her worry he’d just be able to hear her treacherous heart hammering through her chest. The cotton of his shirt was soft under the fingers resting on his shoulder. She found that she could not fight the smile blooming instinctually across her face. 

The dance was a quiet, simple thing. It was the same steps repeated over and over, in a modest circle that led them further away from the light of the door. Asha would remember every second of it like it was etched on her skin. When the song came to an end, she resented it for being so very short. The final closing notes drifted up on the air, and the two of them slowed, both knowing that in a matter of seconds they wouldn’t have an excuse to be holding each other anymore.

And because Vivienne was right - because Cullen was excruciatingly aware of every reason Asha had to hate him, because Cullen was so frustratingly noble and selfless, because he was still probably half-convinced she didn’t even like him all that much as a friend - Asha knew. She _knew_ that he would break off, and step away without another word. They’d go back into the ballroom. They’d act like nothing happened. He'd tuck this memory away, and she would to, and then resumed their daily lives much as before. 

A dance like this, and he still wouldn’t push for it to mean anything more than what it was.

But then, he didn’t understand what precisely it meant to her, did he?

They slowed, then stopped, frozen in place as they took two breaths, still pressed nearly cheek to cheek. As Asha predicted, Cullen drew back slightly, still not letting go of her hands. “Thank you, Inquisitor,” he said, his voice carefully, ever so carefully neutral. “I hope I didn’t shame your people _too_ badly.”

“No, that was… nice.” Asha said, wishing for not the first time that her brain could function properly. As he began to pull back further, she reflexively tightened her hold on both his hand and his shoulder to keep him with her. He halted, looking confused. Which was fair. 

“Um, Cullen?”

“Yes, Inquisitor?”

Asha took a deep breath, looked briefly up at the starry night sky, and sent a quick prayer up to the Creators: 

_Please, please, please don’t let this be weird, because Vivienne was the one who talked me into it._

And then, she kissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Guys. Did you really think I was going to have their first kiss in _Chapter Sixty-Nine?_ That would just be crass! I'm way, way more classy than that ;)
> 
> I know no one cares about this author's note but: I made changes to Cullen's relationship with the HoF 1. because this HoF has so very obviously never been straight in her life and 2. I don't like what Inquisition makes that crush into in Cullen's dialogue. Origins Cullen is an embarrassed wreck around this Amell during that one conversation they have because she _fucked_ and was simply too gay on main. There. Fixed it.


	70. Chapter Seventy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts, part 7

The kiss was gentle.

Asha - not wanting another teeth-smashing scenario, if she was being shallow, and wanting to both savour and quell the friction of nerves by starting slow, if she wasn’t - leaned in and sealed her lips, gently, over Cullen’s. 

A hesitant, chaste press, with just enough pressure to feel the faltering imperfection of his scar under her mouth. His skin was warm, and there was a faint rasp of stubble that made her immediately want to run her hands up along the edge of his jaw and wrench him to her. Her eyes fluttered shut with that first telltale swoop of her stomach, as she tried to school herself in patience and let herself linger, soft and sure, feeling herself smile slightly against his mouth. 

His body tensed up against her and she carefully pulled back, wanting to see his face. To know for sure.

Opening her eyes again, she saw Cullen blinking down at her, looking dazed. But Asha thought it was a good kind of dazed, like when she’d slapped that tranquil aura on him, and all his anxiety had melted away. 

Not that he looked relaxed. He actually seemed to be holding his breath.

 _Maybe he does like me_ , she thought, a little dazed herself. His face was as open as a broken-in door, and far easier to read than Solas’ had ever been.

“Ok." Deep breath. "So,” she said, a little embarrassed by the fact that she was breathless already. She dropped her left hand from his shoulder, because the press of the dance hold was making it hard to think. “I realise that Orlais is fucking awful, and you’ve spent your entire week being accosted and sexually harassed by a bunch of fucking twats in lace, so it’s completely fine if you’re not - _mmp!_ ”

Her semi-planned and almost professional speech about consent and boundaries was abruptly cut off by Cullen yanking her towards him by the hand he still held. Not that she had much of a distance to cross: she more just pitched into him hard enough to make him stumble back a couple of steps. But he was indecently strong (there was the second stomach swoop), and he easily straightened with her now pressed at every available angle against the hard line of his body. Under the palm she’d slapped on his chest abruptly for balance, she felt a thundering heartbeat and was proud to find it was not her own. With a hand that was fighting to stay steady, he reached up and drew a reverent line across her cheekbone with his thumb.

The touch felt like it was barely there, but also seemed to _burn_.

“Braver than me to the last,” he murmured. He looked at their clasped hands, still intertwined from the dance, and lifted them both to place a single kiss on the inside of Asha’s wrist. It thrilled through her, unfairly trumping her own offering, by _miles_. “You should really be the one leading the army.”

Asha, reckless and on edge, couldn’t help herself. She giggled. It was disgusting. “Now now, Commander, don’t go making rash declarations you’ll regret. I couldn’t even read six months ago, and I know your deep-seated resentments of incorrect filing-”

And then, thank the gods for both their sakes, he was kissing her again.

This wasn’t gentle. In fact, it in no way resembled the cautious and reserved Cullen Rutherford that Asha thought she knew, and therefore easily surpassed all of her rather well-developed and plotted fantasies. He tugged her towards him, smashed his lips to hers. Almost immediately, teeth grazed her bottom lip, and it only took one, desperate breath from both of them in tandem for it to become messy and open-mouthed. Asha reached up blindly, stroked a line up his jaw that she was surprised made him groan, before burying her fingers deep in his hair and pulling him closer. Their lips parted briefly, their noses brushed as they found a new angle, and then his tongue was in her mouth, tasting a little like wine.

They both seemed to decide at the same time that their interlocked hands could be of greater use elsewhere, and they hastily disentangled them without breaking away from each other. Asha’s hand joined the other one, clutching desperately at fistfuls of his hair - he used some kind of product, that vain, _vain_ man! - and she felt his jacket slip from her shoulders as she arched into him. Cullen’s arm, meanwhile, went around her back, and she made a low noise of encouragement. Though she wasn’t entirely sure of his plans, she was pretty certain all of them were _excellent_. Which served her right, really, when suddenly the world was lurching and she was startled to discover he’d lifted her just an inch or so off the ground, to push the both of them backwards. 

Asha felt her shoulder bump against a wall with a light rasp of stonework on bare skin. The lights sparking behind her closed eyes were now deep blues and purples. She realised he must have manoeuvred them both away from the open doors and the light spilling from them, entirely out of sight from any prying eyes. 

Ever the strategist. She bit into his lip to show her approval, and he... shuddered against her, pressing her further into the wall and running a thumb along her exposed collarbone while she used his shirt collar to leverage him even closer.

 _Courting like sexually repressed fifteen year olds._ That was how Vivienne had described them, despairingly. Asha supposed that what followed wasn’t all that different from when she’d been half-mad with first love, clueless regarding what to do with first desire, and revelling in the incipient power she’d discovered she could hold over other people. Asha’s dress was sheer but it was still frustratingly structured, like trying to press against him through armour. And she couldn’t exactly disrobe in the palace grounds... not after burning her last ounce of goodwill beating a Duchess to a pulp, which suddenly seemed like a colossal waste. But that didn’t matter, because Cullen’s lips made wonderful use of everywhere they could reach. At her jaw, her neck, her collarbone, her bare shoulders, and then back on her mouth when she made a whimper she hoped sounded commanding and not just desperate. Asha wondered the vial of healing potion she had strapped to her leg to combat the pain of her recent wounds would be enough to remedy the marks, or if it would just accelerate their progression into obvious.

But more importantly, she wanted _under his shirt._

As her hands trailed down and pressed against his abdomen to untuck his shirt from his waistband - she swallowed a noise from him that she immediately committed to memory - suddenly the music swelled. Stopped.

And thunderous applause rang out from the inside of the ballroom. The Winter’s Ball at Halamshiral was over.

The two of them broke apart, gasping.

“Maker’s breath,” Cullen said, at the same moment as Asha whispered, “by the Creators.” 

They met each other’s eyes, and grinned unabashedly at each other, looking almost drunk.

“Fuck,” he whispered, tension leaking from him like a loosened bow string. He rested his forehead on his arm, where it now bracketed her in against the wall. They each took a few moments to catch their breath. When he raised his head again, his face was flushed and his mouth looked mauled. “I… I really didn’t want to fuck that up.”

Asha smiled gently, his honesty doing funny things to her stomach. 

“Well, that really makes things awkward, because obviously,” she gestured at the fact there was less than half an inch between them, and then at what she guessed was her own state of dishevelment, “I absolutely _hated_ it. Every moment was a chore.”

“Damn,” he murmured, leaning in and pressing his face against her hair to whisper, “I _knew_ I should have worn the half-cape.”

Asha snorted with laughter, and kept laughing as she buried her face in his shoulder. She was certain she’d never been this happy.

Healing potion downed, hair hesitantly rearranged, dust brushed off the crumpled jacket that they’d both ploughed through on their journey in wall-related directions... they returned to the ballroom. It really did feel like they were children, who’d snuck off away from adult supervision and trying to stealthily worm their way back in unnoticed. Asha worried that their absence, followed by them returning together, would be immediately noted as gossip, but it turned out she needn’t have worried.

Because Ellana was shitfaced.

“ _Why_ , exactly, is my sister shitfaced?” she asked the crowd, as they began leveraging the drunken, boneless puddle of her sister into one of the carriages. As soon as Ellana had seen her, she’d hugged her for far too long while she burbled elvhen in her ear. Which was actually the perfect cover for the state of Asha's rumpled clothes.

“Squinty and Rivaini may have gotten Summer a drink..." Varric admitted sheepishly, “...every time she called Choir Boy a cunt.”

“Oh. Is that Sebastian Vael? Oh. Dear.”

“He… din’t like Anders!” Ellana informed her, furious and also basically horizontal, “ef’en though Anders saved you from th’Spider that made you sad. I tol’ him, but he din’t belif me! An... _an_!... he tried to make Hawke him! Kill er’fren! He said it wassa shame you wer’a’maleffficar, that i'waz _you_ th'caused th’Chantry to fracture! An then he said he, ‘had Dalish friends’!”

“Yes, but he _was_ at least very pretty in person, so it was worthwhile in that respect,” Asha said gently. When Cullen raised an eyebrow at her from where he was holding Ellana’s other arm, she rolled her eyes at him over her sister's lolling head. It wasn’t like she’d spent the last half hour of her life being pressed against the wall and getting grit embedded in her back... by _the King of Starkhaven_. 

“We only danssed once! How did he manage t’say so much bullshit in on’dance!?”

“What the fuck kind of drinks were they even giving you?” Asha asked the air, remembering how well El had done on Golden Scythe.

“Rivaini _may_ have had a hipflask on her person,” Varric confessed. "I've never dared drink from it, myself. And I'm a dwarf. Who used to live in a pub."

“App’rently he asssked Sid f’a chaste marriage, ‘cuz he knew sh’only liked girls an’ thought Bela wasssn’t good enough!” Ellana said, as Asha finally arranged her into a respectable sitting position inside the carriage. She ruined it by leaning forward, then nearly overbalancing, to say conspiratorially, “Don’t do this, Cullen. Don’t p’pose a chaste marriage. That would beeeeeee bad.”

Asha smirked as a red flush crept up Cullen’s neck and he tried not to look at her. “I… have never taken the same vows as Sebastian Vael.”

“Oh well. I suppose, with a face like that, he had to be single because of his personality,” Asha said, sensibly.

“ _Maybe only one of us can have a Chantry boyfr... boyfriend,_ ” Ellana told Asha in slurred elvhen, as she also clambered up into the carriage, “ _it would probably be unhealthy of us otherwise. Like we had a… complex or something._ ”

“I’m so, so glad you said that in elvhen.”

Cullen was watching her carefully from the ground below, “what did she say in elvhen?”

“She’s deathly certain that Chantry boys don’t know how to kiss,” Asha responded immediately, then gave Cullen a wide, triumphant grin as he fully tipped over the boundary into beetroot.

“ _See! How could you think he doesn’t like you!_ ” Ellana yelled drunkenly, gesturing at him. He watched her sister’s flailing with mild concern as the footman shut the carriage door, muting her shouts. “ _It’s obvious! Are you actually blind?_ ”

“Do calm down, _da’lath’in_ ,” Asha said, as the carriage rolled off, leaving Cullen behind. 

She helped Ellana up the steps pf their _chateau_ and to her room, hearing the arrival of the other Inquisition members a few minutes after them as she unlaced and wrestled her sister out of her dress and plucked rumpled flowers from her hair. It then took the better part of an hour to coax Ellana, in her nightdress, into her bed. Ellana was convinced that - at three in the morning, and drunk out of her mind - she wanted to try out the pubs in Halamshiral.

“They will _not_ serve elves, El.”

“They’ll serve _me_!” she retorted. And so it carried on, until she abruptly passed out.

Asha scrubbed her face tiredly. Well, that was one way to end the night. And while it had certainly involved wrestling _someone_ into bed, she wasn’t entirely certain it was the someone she'd been expecting. That wayward thought was all it took to set her skin alight again. Despite feeling worn out, she knew she couldn’t sleep. At least the adrenaline coursing through her wasn’t from fighting for her life, this time. What a fucking novelty.

Should she go find him? ...The house wasn’t silent. She could hear the low murmur of voices in the living room below, the deep bass rumble of Bull easy to identify. There was a clink of glasses from the kitchen and a shouted, unidentifiable toast, heralding a nightcap. Asha found the buttons on the side of her dress and prised it off of her body, changing into a baggy shirt and breeches. It was a very pretty dress, but gods, was it good to take a full breath, to no longer have bone and fabric pressing in against everything including her tranquil brand.

She padded barefoot across the room while Ellana snuffled like a woodland animal in her bed, turning over with a murmur. With one final glance behind, she opened the door onto the darkened corridor outside and silently shut it behind her, not wanting to ruin all of her hard work getting her sister to shut up and sleep.

She turned, and walked right into what was fast becoming a very familiar chest.

Without her shoes on, she was now embarrassingly short, but she found she didn’t mind much as she now craned back her head to look up at Cullen. He was staying in the other residence - he must have come over to see her. She opened her mouth to speak, but was cut off as he immediately ducked his head down low to kiss her, pressing her against the doorframe- he seemed to like doing that - and then tugging her by her waist into a small alcove by the bay window opposite, again manoeuvring them out of direct view of anyone who might come up the stairs. Asha thought, _honestly, why the fuck not?_ and kissed him back languidly, placing both her arms around his shoulders and stroking the soft hair at the nape of his neck.

When they broke apart, she caught her breath and said, “by Mythal. Not that I’m about to complain, or anything, but what if that had been Ellana?”

“Shockingly, Asha, I am able to tell the difference.” Cullen looked down at her, with a slight smirk as she fidgeted in his arms, under his gaze, and then realised there was probably no point being awkward. “How is your sister?”

“You know when I get shitfaced?” Asha asked, “imagine that, but of course it’s far less adorable and endearing, with a lot more shouting and insistence on further drink.”

“You consider your drunkenness... endearing?”

“You... _don’t?_ ” she challenged, carefully, and claimed another victory when two bright stripes of colour appeared on his cheekbones. Not that she was keeping score. 

But that was definitely two to her.

She wanted to chase this feeling, nerves in her stomach popping and fizzing. She moved her hand so that it cupped his jaw, thumb grazing across the shadow of stubble and feeling the slight jump of his pulse. “You here for any reason in particular?” she asked softly, pretty certain she knew the answer. “Dire news from the palace? Demon rift in Celene’s bed chamber? Leliana’s murdered Morrigan, and we need a place to bury the body?”

“Um. No. Not really.”

“Just this then?” she asked, thumb ghosting his mouth while his throat bobbed with a swallow.

“I definitely had something to say, but... I confess the words are rather escaping me.”

“Oh my goodness, war room meetings are going to be a fucking _breeze_ ,” she grinned, and then leveraged her grip on his shoulders and pushed herself up on tiptoe to kiss him again.

This kiss was far less ravenous than the one on the balcony, but no less hungry. The shift in pace was like gently stepping into a steaming bath and letting the heat suffuse your skin until your heartbeat thundered - rather than flinging yourself on a fire mine to get the exact same effect. Warmth built between them. She kept one hand fisted in his hair to steer him where she wanted while the hand by his jaw moved to just under his shirt collar, touching the very edges of muscle built from years of fighting. The mental image of what lay beyond made her shiver. Maybe one of these days, she’d see him shirtless without grievous injury. Bonus points if it wasn’t one she’d caused.

The shirt she wore wasn’t as pretty as that amazing dress, but both of them were already seeing its advantages. The sensation of their bodies pressed against each other was heightened without corsetry in the way, and she _felt_ softer, like she was melting against him. Drunk on the feeling, her first thought when his hands ghosted gently down her body was _yes_. Then his fingers tentatively, uncertainly crept under the untucked hem of her shirt. And because he considered himself some kind of gentleman, they went to the bare skin of her back first, rather than straight towards anything that could be groped. The first touch of his fingers on her spine sent a delicious jolt all the way through her. Only -

She froze, and her hand quickly left his hair to clamp down around his wrist, stilling him in turn. His hand was low on the small of her back but... She wasn’t wearing a vest. It was one of the few times she wasn’t wearing a vest. She’d even worn one for all of her dress fittings. She’d worn a vest even as she fucked Skinner, and the elf hadn’t asked her to remove it after a single glare had signalled it was staying on.

Cullen broke away to see the startled, panicked look on her face, and Creators damn him, it was immediately obvious he knew its cause. Asha felt mortified and tried to fight that feeling, knowing she had nothing to be ashamed of as his hands retracted. “My apologies,” he said, voice rough, “I should’ve-”

“It’s not because-” she didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“I know it’s not,” he reassured her.

“I just-”

“Ash?” came an incoherent moan from the bedroom across the corridor. Ellana’s voice caused them both to startle and jump apart, even though the door remained shut and the call was muffled behind it.

Asha swallowed, cleared her throat, before shouting back: “Yeah?”

“Think ‘m gonna be sick.”

“Oh, balls.” Asha muttered. She gave Cullen an apologetic glance. He hastily stepped back to let her pass. There was nothing in that room to be sick apart from vases, and it was far less acceptable to vomit into Imperial porcelain, as opposed to Skyhold’s own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was it worth the wait? *runs away and hides*
> 
> This is technically the end of Part III. I may or may not be taking a hiatus next weekend, depending on how I feel. I think I need to give myself breathing space by either doing that or reducing to once weekly updates, but I'd rather keep up with the current pacing if I can!
> 
> Author's note on this chapter: have I used the nickname 'Squinty' for Hawke before this? Basically, bc Sidonie has one eye (see chapter 37 lol), that's Varric's nickname for her in this worldstate. 
> 
> I'm sure that's the burning question that everyone has about this chapter ;) xx


	71. Chapter Seventy-One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Returning to Skyhold.

Even though the Winter’s Ball had ended, it was the ride _back_ to Skyhold that held a festive atmosphere. They’d defeated the assassin, foiled the next step in Corypheus’ plan, and more importantly… they _didn’t have to be in Orlais anymore_. Everyone was ecstatic about that news, and eager to make it back through the Frostbacks before Satinalia. Given that the winter snows were about to make anything and everything incredibly difficult for the Red Templar army, wherever its forces may be, they were actually facing something of a break until the spring thaws began. 

The day they set out from Halamshiral, everyone got hangover pastries on Asha’s insistence - after all, the patisserie was the only worthwhile thing about Orlais. She spent her coin more liberally than she ever had, even in the Black Emporium. A few days into travel, while they were eating the third batch on horseback, she glanced over to find that eating while mounted had not gone entirely well for Cullen. Icing sugar covered his entire nose, and streaked across his cheek, like he was a baker in the Skyhold kitchen. 

“What’s with the grimace?” she asked, innocently, in a very loud voice that turned everyone’s attention to him. And his icing sugar nose.

“These are… far too sweet, Inquisitor,” he muttered, frowning down at the pastry boat filled with vanilla custard and lemon curd, like the reincarnated dowager aunt he was. “They hurt my teeth.”

“Aww, poor baby,” she grinned, and, now sure everyone in the Inquisition had seen his face, she tapped her own nose and waggled her eyebrows. She heard cursing behind her as she spurred Buttons on ahead, marking the moment he realised exactly what she was pointing out to him.

That evening, when they took watch together, she ate her last three pastries, and when he kissed her, she giggled evilly at the fact it made his teeth hurt.

It was a less than a week back to Skyhold. They took a path crossing the Elfsblood River - “charming country, Orlais,” Asha remarked - and then climbed up the mountains into Skyhold. If the fortress had seemed imposing when they first approached it all those months ago, now it seemed even more so: a lone speck against the skyline, with snowdrifts taller than Asha's head collecting against the ramparts. But the castle was built to weather winter. In the next week there were no war room meetings, only cups of tea by Josie’s fire while they discussed the finer parts of what had taken place in Orlais, and how they could use their newfound treaty to their advantage. 

Asha guessed that Leliana was postponing actual official meetings, because actual official meetings would mean Morrigan in attendance.

With the weather rapidly turning awful, Asha and Cullen now played chess in his office rather than the courtyard. Even though it was rapidly becoming clear that his building was drafty as all fuck. Seriously, why was three doors considered acceptable architectural design? Cullen wouldn’t even use draft excluders in case soldiers needed to come in with reports - even though Blackwall had offered to change the doors so they opened outwards rather than inwards. 

Despite the constant chill, Asha didn’t extend an invitation to hold the game in her quarters. She still hadn’t won a game against him, the bastard, which meant she _really_ didn’t fancy the intellectual challenge of playing against him with her bed _three feet away_ , like an elephant in a very, very small room. 

Also, she still technically shared her quarters with Ellana.

“I’ve just realised,” she said aloud, halfway through a match in which she was now wearing four layers of clothing, three sets of socks, and a blanket, and was even considering stealing Cullen’s stupid fur monstrosity from his shoulders. “I have no fucking clue where you sleep. I just assumed that you lived in your office, and I’m guessing you kind of do, but... we _did_ give you quarters, right? We didn’t just resign you to your terrible fate?”

“Err… actually…” and he glanced up the ladder in one corner. The room fell immediately silent. As Asha expected, the acknowledged existence of a bed immediately fell on them both like a ten tonne weight.

“We are the most awful enablers,” she remarked, her voice playing at being light even as her heart thundered. “Your work habits are extremely unhealthy and we really shouldn’t encourage them.”

“Currently, I find myself quite at ease with my work-life balance,” he replied, mildly. And when she left late after they had finished two games (she had yet to win one, although she was getting close), he pressed her against the door and kissed her thoroughly. Her bulky winter wear acted as the modesty blanket she apparently needed, when all she could think about was the bed somewhere in the space above them.

There were lots of stolen kisses, in those first two weeks back at Skyhold. Whenever they found themselves alone in his office. Once when they took the same exit out of Josephine's office, after everyone had left, and once in the stables, using Buttons’ height as convenient cover while she snacked on hay and mostly looked unimpressed. In the kitchens, when she pretended she was unable to sleep, but had actually stayed up late for the chance to glimpse him after not seeing him all day. The hidden alcove on the stairs where Asha had denied liking him outright to Ellana proved to be a popular spot several times over, after an accidental encounter when she was fresh steamed from a bath, or he was. 

When damp, his hair was as toffee dark as his eyes, and for some reason she found it irresistible. 

Since that first night in Orlais, his hands never strayed under her clothes. Asha was too preoccupied with whether this trend pleased or disappointed her, to notice that all their kisses had also taken place in secret, by silent yet somehow mutual agreement.

Her waking days involved less training as the weather worsened, and were instead spent trying desperately to work out what Corypheus’ next move would be. Unfortunately, with the defeat of Florianne, the font of knowledge offered by their convenient future Redcliffe premonitions had run dry. She spent her days in the library with Dorian and Solas, pouring over old books and maps and texts that she could finally read, spinning theories. 

“I’m telling you,” she said one day, when they were all stood around Solas’ desk during a tea break, in which Solas stoically refused to drink tea. “The elven ruins are definitely a thing, right? All those reports Leliana has say he’s searching them for something. The orb that he was trying to rupture the Veil with was elven, all those weird elvhen runes my anchor reveals mean... _something._ He claims the Maker’s seat was empty - maybe he’s plundering other pantheons for some way to ascend to Godhood? Another artefact, maybe? Keeper Deshanna once told me about the Mask of Fen'Harel - it was supposed to tear holes in the Veil, like the rifts. Maybe he’s looking for that?”

“...There are many means by which ancient elves traversed the… the Veil,” Solas said, calmly. “It is certainly an avenue worth pursuing.”

“I’ve got a meeting with Morrigan tomorrow, I’ll ask her if she knows of anything,” said Asha. She tried and failed to keep her excitement out of her voice as she continued, “Guys! Did you know she was the daughter of the Witch of the Wilds!? Literally, she is related to _the Asha'bellanar_! Apparently she can _shapeshift!_ I’m so excited to talk to her. Honestly, I’ve just got so many questions-”

“Inquisitor.” Her excited rant was interrupted, and she turned to see Cullen approaching from the direction of his tower, documents in hand. Warmth blossomed in her chest at the sight of him. He was wearing gloves, his nose was red, and had a light dusting of snow on his hair and eyebrows - he looked _very_ cold. “Celene’s forces have sent the information we requested about the state of play in Emprise du Lion. It looks like a portion of Samson’s forces have bedded down there for the winter…”

“...Which means there’s something there they consider worthy of protecting,” she finished for him, taking the documents out of his hands. She looked down at them. “So, our guesses are probably right: Sahrnia is his main source of red lyrium.”

“It certainly looks like it,” he confirmed. “The sources you’ve tapped along the Storm Coast haven’t really made a dent in their overall supply, which suggests their main reserves come from Orlais, not Ferelden.”

“Damn. I don’t like leaving it operating for another few months, but-”

“-We kind of have to,” this time, he finished a sentence for her. “Emprise du Lion is a frigid wasteland at the best of times - all the roads are currently snowed under. I don’t really like it either, but they won’t be getting any red lyrium out of Sahrnia any time soon, in these conditions. Ten weeks isn’t the longest time to wait, if it guarantees our forces safer passage...”

“You're right. Well. I’ll check through the notes and let you know if I have any questions,” As she spoke, she continued leafing through the report to check how long that task would take her, and absent-mindedly leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you!”

She was still tabbing through, dog-earing a section that looked important, when she noticed the silence. 

Glancing up, she realised all three men in the rotunda with her had frozen in place. Dorian was fighting a delighted smile, Solas looked tense and carefully neutral, and Cullen outright dazed, his face no longer reddened by just the cold.

There was a beat of silence, as she too stilled with a frown, wondering what exactly she’d done wrong. Was she not allowed to dog-ear reports?

“I _knew_ it!” Dorian suddenly crowed. “I fucking _knew_ it! I _told_ Bull, I _told him_ , but he said he didn’t think you guys had even slept together. _Benn-Hassreth_ , my arse! Did it happen at Halamshiral? Or was it last week when you both came up from the baths looking _very_ flustered? Wait! No! Don’t tell me! I need to go claim my bet from Varric, and giving us a timeline may affect the odds.”

“There’s… a bet?” Cullen said weakly, putting a hand to his cheek.

“There’s _a bet?_ ” Asha said, in a very different tone of voice. She knew Varric had placed wagers on Hawke’s own love life. But she also thought he was the type of man to learn from his mistakes.

“Of course there’s a bet! The days are long, and full of demons - which means you two are practically all we have as a spectator sport!” Dorian continued, “I was firmly in the ‘secret relationship’ camp. You’ve just made my day.”

“We’re not in a ‘secret relationship’,” Asha said, frowning, “secret relationships are stupid. If you need to keep someone a secret, or keep secrets _from_ them, you’re not ready to be in a relationship with them. Simple. And the days are getting _shorter_ , not longer.”

“A figure of speech, dear, and do you mind keeping that information to yourself for the next half hour? I’ll be honest, the difference between ‘secret relationship’ and ‘chantry-raised, with Fereldan sensibilities’ is probably thin enough that I can get all my money on a technicality.”

“I - why does everyone think we’re keeping this a secret?” Asha asked incredulously, while Cullen was rapidly looking like he wanted to die. 

“Um, Inquisitor, may I… speak with you a moment? In private?”

“No, no, no, no, seriously! This _will not do_. Can’t you lovebirds just wait another _half an hour_ , no matter how irresistible you find each other?” Dorian stressed - although, at this point his smug grin meant it was clear that he was mostly just enjoying himself at their expense. “You have no idea how quickly gossip spreads in this place.”

“And yet, you are the loudest one here,” Solas observed, in a severe tone.

“If that’s half an hour I can spend beating you with my spirit blade, absolutely,” Asha said at the same time.

“This must be why you like her so much,” Dorian said to Cullen. “Her delicate, ladylike sensibilities.” 

“You can shove my ‘delicate, ladylike sensibilities’ right up your-”

Cullen dragged Asha away by her wrist before she could finish her sentence.

“Honestly!” she said, as he dragged her out onto the balcony. The temperature was below freezing, and she immediately started shivering as an icy wind howled round the side of the library tower. “This place is worse than a Dalish clan, and that’s fucking saying something! I had aunts offering me chastity tea within _two days_ of me just telling Mahanon I liked him.”

“‘Chastity tea’?”

“A bit of a cultural misnomer,” she clarified. “It’s contraception, not something awful. The myth is that Fen’Harel gave the recipe to the first elves to _really_ piss Mythal off.”

Skyhold was currently shrouded under a heavy, low-hanging cloud, so thick that the courtyard below them wasn’t visible. Even Cullen’s tower was simply a dark shape obfuscated by fog. They stepped out onto the middle of the walkway, a road hovering over indeterminable, grey nothingness. Asha hugged her arms, feeling her teeth begin to chatter.

“Oh, damn, my apologies,” Cullen said, and then immediately ducked back through the door into the warmth of the library. A few seconds later, he returned with the thick woollen cloak she’d left hung over her chair. He passed it over and she wrapped herself in it hastily, feeling ice begin to crystallise in her hair. 

She glanced at Cullen to see him watching her. “What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said quickly, then paused. “Well, no, not nothing. I… er… thought it best to have this conversation without…”

“Without Dorian providing running commentary?” Asha supplied, and then his words sunk in and she began to feel dread in her stomach. “Oh, fuck. Is there a conversation we need to have, then? Oh… Mythal’s tits - did you _want_ it to be kept secret? Was that a thing? I didn’t realise it was-”

“Actually, no,” he interrupted, with a slightly rueful smile. “I was actually, er, rather under the impression that _you_ wanted things to remain, um...”

“Gods no!” Asha blurted. Then blushed. She’d said that quite loudly. 

But she’d spent all that time stewing over whether or not to act on her feelings because she knew the type of person she was. She might sleep with people for fun, and she might set out certain parameters for both their sakes at the start, but she never began a relationship without going all in. It was why things with Solas had been such a clusterfuck, and it was why, on that balcony in Halamshiral, she’d committed to… to _something_ with Cullen, at least. Creators damn her, she’d kind of forgotten about the talking part. She’d been entirely too preoccupied with other things.

“It’s just that, um, in Orlais- and, well, the… the last few weeks…”

“That was _Orlais_. I was under the impression that Vivienne’s heart might actually give out, if I breached decorum a final time. And, well, since then…” Asha reviewed all of their past encounters since Halmashiral, and started to realise that they’d all taken place in convenient alcoves, or behind closed doors. “Oh. Bollocks. I just thought you were, y’know, being _professional_. No offense. But that’s kind of like. Your thing. Your go-to. I was mostly just following your lead.”

Cullen’s shoulders visibly fell. He deflated in relief, and then he let out a small chuckle, shaking his head. “Andraste preserve me, I am starting to get a premonition that we might end up being really very bad at this.”

“Hey!” Asha said, taking a step forward and poking his absurdly broad chest. “Speak for yourself! I was _respecting boundaries_.” She folded her arms and then raised an eyebrow, “I can hardly abuse my position of power by molesting my subordinates.”

“Yes. Molesting. Maker forfend. Perish the very thought,” Cullen huffed with a small smile, and she laughed. He also took a step forward until there was barely any space in between them whatsoever and, after a moment’s hesitation, he began rearranging her cloak, pulling it tighter over her shoulders and straightening the hood so it rested properly against her back. “I - I didn’t want to presume. I rather thought you might, um, need some time to-”

She watched him, while he busied his hands, fussing over her and smoothing the cloak down her shoulders. Ah - so _this_ was what she’d been missing. The small touches and gestures of affection, that he hadn’t dare made in public, because…

“You thought I might be ashamed of you,” she said quietly, looking at his face and the frown lines that still permanently marred his forehead. Despite everything that had happened between them, he was still always just that little bit sad. 

“I… thought you might need some time to adjust to the idea.” he responded, not meeting her eye.

She placed her hand against his chest. “I feel like we’re both adapting quite well, wouldn’t you say?” she tried to say it lightly, though her voice definitely frayed a little at the end, with both affection and frustration.

“I… I know I might not be the man you deserve-”

“Oh, you idiot,” she interrupted, softly. So Vivienne was right, then - there was enough brooding, on each side, to fill one of Varric’s novels. She stepped in closer, though that wasn't really possible, at this point. “One: it’s _‘person’_. And two: it’s not even that. It’s not ‘person I deserve’ - it’s ‘person I _want_ ’. Relationships don’t function as rewards for anyone’s behaviour, or as redemption, Cullen. I know who you are, and…” she gave him a small smile, tugging on the collar of his coat, “I find myself quite pleased with you.” 

And it wasn’t in spite of who he was either, but because of it. And then Asha realised that they were both terrible at communication, so she ploughed on even as the words felt awkward and inadequate. “And that’s not ‘in spite of’, or ‘regardless’ of who you are, either. I’m hardly going into this blind.”

He swallowed, looking a little stunned, then leant in and rested his forehead against hers, eyelids fluttering shut. “You win. I consider myself reprimanded.”

“What about you, then? You’re ok being seen with an angry apostate, who shouts at you and kind of thinks the Maker doesn’t exist?”

“Maybe it’s because of this martyr complex I’m constantly accused of having, but I find myself perfectly, indecently happy with the situation,” he said. “Once, that ‘angry apostate’ broke my ribs…” his lip quirked, scar pulled taut, and Asha’s stomach dropped with his low voice as he continued, “and I almost thanked her for it.” ” 

Asha’s suddenly became a little flustered. She wondered if he could feel her pulse racing, and one look at him as she pulled back slightly told her that it was written all over her face, at the very least. “Right. Well.” she cleared her throat. “That was a pretty straight-forward conversation.”

“Relatively painless, for us.”

“Public relationship?”

He chuckled, and nodded, “public relationship.”

“Um, good. Because it’s fucking freezing out here, and…” she glanced around her periphery, to see Leliana approaching from the library, and one of Cullen’s blasted lieutenants approaching from his office, “I think all that cover we accidentally built up, like the clearly masterful spies we are, is now completely-”

She was interrupted mid-sentence to find that his mouth was suddenly on hers. She squeaked a little - it was typical, amongst the Dalish, to at least _try_ to conduct these kinds of things privately, if only because it was acknowledged that everyone lived in everyone’s pockets, and privacy was nearly impossible to find. His mouth was ice cold, but soft with just that edge of friction from his stubble. As her eyes fluttered closed, she decided there were worse fates than letting her lips part under his. 

After all, it was _very_ cold. She pressed back against the stone of the walkway and then tugged him in close, to shamelessly steal every ounce of warmth he had. He stumbled into her, pressing her against the wall, and then hissed against her mouth when her frigid bare hands wheedled their way under his jacket to loop around the small of his back. Her ice-cold fingers splayed out, feeling the warmth of him through his shirt. She nipped at his bottom lip lightly, and it was at around that point that Leliana pointedly cleared her throat, and Cullen’s ‘Fereldan sensibilities’ (or maybe just his superior professionalism) won out.

“Finally,” was the spymaster’s only remark, once they dutifully broke apart.

Asha raised an eyebrow - the kiss hadn’t been quite obnoxiously long enough to warrant a snide comment, which meant the Nightingale was referring to something else. “...Any bets you need to cash in?”

“Bull and I were actually disqualified from joining the stakes,” Leliana replied with a smirk. “Dorian had to prove he wouldn’t be getting outside help, before he could put any money in. My only involvement was helping Varric come up with more scenarios to add to his pool. A personal favourite was the theory that you’d fucked like nugs on the war table back in Haven, with all that antagonistic tension, and that these last few months were just you dealing with the excruciating aftermath.”

Cullen was damn near choking, and hastily tried to disentangle himself from her arms, but Asha couldn’t help but feel morbidly curious, and also wouldn’t let him move back. Arms still firmly planted around his waist (hands getting warmer by the second, given that the man’s muscle made him feel like a personal furnace), she asked, “what were the odds on that one?”

“274 to 1,” the Nightingale replied in a mild tone. “Sera bet twenty gold on it.”

“...What did Josie bet on?” It seemed to her that the Ambassador would be the only person with a chance of coming close to the truth.

“ _Asha_.”

“Ten gold on a confession, from Cullen’s side, on the night we beat Corypheus.”

“That’s awfully presumptuous of her,” Asha remarked. “Given that we haven’t any idea how to defeat Corypheus, yet. Alternatively, this poor man could’ve been waiting years.” She glanced sideways at Cullen, “ _would_ you have waited years?”

“Andraste preserve me,” Cullen muttered to the sky. Asha grinned and then raised an innocent eyebrow as her hands moved a little lower, and he fully began to blush again.

“Please take it more as a testament of our faith in you, Inquisitor,” Leliana said. Meanwhile, Cullen’s lieutenant just hovered awkwardly at the side, clearly at a loss for how to proceed. “You’ve actually outdone yourself. To anyone else, this current state of affairs was unthinkable. Very few people will make any money out of that bet - other than Varric himself, of course, and that’s split three ways with Bull and I. Madame de Fer is the only other person to walk away with a respectable sum.”

It was Asha’s turn to freeze. “...Vivienne?”

“She placed a bet on the Winter Palace as the locale,” Leliana said blandly. “Seemed to think all those dresses and nice suits might create a certain… atmosphere.”

So… that was why the First Enchanter had felt inclined to rake Asha’s love life over the coals. To cheat her way to winning a bet. 

“That… that bitch!” Asha cried out, indignantly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey pals! Thank you for weathering my hiatus, I hope this chapter is worth the wait :)
> 
> I received a lot of super nice comments on my last chapters, and I'm so, so glad all the slow burn feels were worth it! Your words have given me some sorely needed boosts in serotonin, as 2020 continues to get worse and worse. But who knows, the UK and Scotland's second lockdown might produce more wonders on the wordcount front, at least. Hope everyone is staying safe xx


	72. Chapter Seventy-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New Year's at Skyhold!

Ellana, needless to say, was livid. _That_ deception had taken place not out of any desire for a secret relationship, but more as an exercise in curiosity, to see how long one could keep a secret from a very nosey sibling, who was very invested in one's love life.

The day after she found out, Asha’s sister loudly stomped through Skyhold, to request her own quarters from Josephine - while the Ambassador ate dinner, rather than during her office hours. If anyone was in doubt the Inquisitor was canoodling with her Commander, her terrible sister had now confirmed it, at the top of her lungs. She was placed in a room nearby Solas and Morrigan, facing Skyhold’s courtyard which was now under two feet of snow. 

Cullen and Asha now couldn’t be in a room together without itching under other people’s stares and, once Ellana moved her scant belongings to her new room, couldn’t really look at each other without their skin crawling with new awareness either.

“I saw them holding hands as they walked to a war room meeting,” El announced in the Herald’s Rest, slamming her ale down so close that it nearly splashed on Asha’s sleeve. “It was _disgusting_.”

“I was personally a fan of that sparring session they moved to the courtyard,” Bull replied. “Could cut that tension _with a knife_.”

For all the eyebrows that Ellana’s new accommodation had raised, _this_ night was the true advent of her sister’s revenge. The same moment she had asked for her new quarters, El announced to the mess hall the one thing Asha had hoped would evade everyone’s knowledge and notice:

New Year’s Eve was the Inquisitor’s name day.

And, according to Ellana, the Inquisitor would be the one buying the drinks.

Asha hadn’t been planning on making a big deal out of turning twenty-eight. It was her first name day she’d been conscious for since losing Clan Lavellan. She also had two missing birthdays, so it didn’t feel like something worth celebrating. Nothing, even in Skyhold, could compare to celebrating the Shifting Night in her family araval, getting drunk on warmed whiskey with honey. Her ma would wax lyrical about how she knew she was birthing a mage, in that strange time when the sun set on an age and rose to a new one, and then they’d all pass out drunk around the table after reciting some stories and singing a few songs. 

Of course, with Ellana here, things were different. But Asha still hadn’t anticipated a party in the Herald’s Rest. Particularly one in which she was going to be pinned under everyone's gaze like a bug under a magnifying glass, to squirm until all the details of her love life seemingly fell out. Cullen, the traitor, wasn’t even here yet - a supply caravan destined for Skyhold had been stranded by an unexpected avalanche, and he and his men had spent the day shovelling the road clear so it could pass through.

It was now extremely dark outside, but he hadn’t yet made it back. She took a gulp of her unwarmed whiskey, trying not to worry, and braced herself for the next question. 

“So, Flash, inquiring minds - and by that I mean Rivaini - want to know,” Varric said. “What’s he like in bed?”

“Blonde,” Asha responded a little too quickly, and drank another gulp of liquor. She’d been expecting - well, hoping, really - to be more drunk for that inevitable question, which was why she had her answer pre-prepared. It was truthful answer, she assumed - unless he’d secretly been wearing a wig all this time. She had no idea what Cullen was like in bed. Because they hadn’t slept together. She wasn’t entirely sure she could even handle shirtlessness yet.

At thoughts regarding beds and _shirtless_ , she found herself hit by a wave of Cullen-related thoughts that raised colour to her cheeks. She took another two fingers of whiskey.

“Rivaini’s prediction was, and I quote, ‘disgustingly repressed, until pushed to a breaking point’.” Varric watched her face for any kind of reaction. She gave him a bland look, scratched her nose with practiced nonchalance. She took another finger of whiskey, and then her whiskey was gone. 

“By Isabela’s standards, _everyone_ with even a measure of decorum is ‘repressed’,” Cassandra grumbled. Whether the Seeker was coming out in defence of her friend, 'Chantry sensibilities', or simply tossing Asha a lifeline, Asha didn’t know. But she could’ve kissed her for it.

“I don’t know, Seeker, I think there’s something to be said about getting under someone’s armour, not just their skin.” Varric flashed her a grin as he delivered that line, smooth as butter. 

Cassandra’s cheeks flamed, though it could have been with rage. Her expression was thunderous. (It was, as always, kind of attractive.)

Asha supposed it was too much to hope that these kinds of distractions would hold - not when Ellana was also here, holding court at her sibling’s expense. When she came back from the bar with a new whiskey in each hand - it was shaping up to be that kind of night - her sister was already regaling the group. “I don’t know how she hid it from me!” she complained, though the pitch of her voice and the side glances she snuck in Asha’s direction suggested that this was more of a performance. “She’s normally so… so… obvious!”

Alarm bells began to go off in Asha’s head.

“This… _wasn’t_ her being obvious?” Bull smirked.

“Strong words, for a man who tried to make me reduce my bet by half.”

“You _lost_ that bet, Kadan.”

“I still say it was a technicality,” Dorian muttered into his drink.

“Tell us more, Summer,” Varric urged, leaning forward with a wicked grin, while even Cass tried to not look too curious about whatever humiliation was about to follow. “I smell a story.”

“Oh there are a _tonne_ of stories, aren’t there Ash…”

Those alarm bells in Asha’s head were now a lot louder. “Ellana.”

“... I mean, do you remember that one time when Mahanon’s mother caught you and him…”

“ _Ellana_.”

“But...” El said, meeting Asha’s furious glare with the most beatific of smiles, like she didn’t hold her entire life in the palm of her hand, ready to crush. “I was more referring to the fact that my sister is so very _affectionate_ , when she’s seeing someone.”

Asha began to feel her face flame, studiously avoiding eye contact with everyone at the table. Instead, she glared at her monster of a little sister. “ _Are you sure you want to start this?_ ” she asked, cordially, in elvhen.

Ellana simply raised a single, wicked eyebrow, and Asha’s face flamed even more, as she realised just how empty a threat that was. For every embarrassing story El had, Asha had seventeen of increasing severity. Solas - who had, against all odds, actually showed up to this gathering - covered a suspicious-sounding cough with his hand.

“She’s positively clingy,” Ellana continued, blithely. “I hope you all aren’t still too reliant on that anchor, because from now on she’ll never keep her hands to herself.”

Asha knew she was supposed to be the kind of adult who could rise above things and act unaffected. Let it play out. That the point of this terrible interrogation was to provoke her and make her squirm. If she didn’t react, the teasing would die out quickly, and they’d skate onto another topic. 

Instead, she sputtered, in a weak defense of her dignity: “I am _not_ clingy!”

“You never stopped touching Eirdhava,” her sister accused. “It was _embarrassing_. You stroked her hair so much I bet she felt like a mabari.”

“I - you -” Asha struggled, “...she had very nice hair!”

“By that logic, Mahanon had a ‘very nice’-”

“ _I was sixteen_!” Asha nearly roared, knowing the number of mortifying avenues _that_ particular sentence could go down. 

Ellana grinned in smug satisfaction as the table dissolved in laughter, and Asha realised her volume had alerted the attention of people from several other parts of the bar. Glowering, she took another sip of whiskey.

“The thing about Ash,” Ellana said, addressing the table like she was giving an informative lecture on an interesting species of bird, “is that she’s so very uncertain that people like her - in fact, near _convinced_ that they don’t - that once they’ve given the go-ahead and made it clear they’re interested, it’s like a fucking dam has burst. And all those bashful looks and uncertain glances-”

“ _There were so many_ ,” Cassandra groaned. The traitor.

“- give way to the most -”

“Ellana, I swear, with Elgar’nan and every one of his fucking beasts as my witness-”

“- touchy-feely, gross, affectionate, _needy_ -”

In the time it took her sister to begin her list of adjectives, Asha put her hands on both her and Ellana’s half-full glasses. She grounded all her weight through the table with her elbows, pinning it in place.

And then, she mindblasted her sister out of her chair. 

It was only a _small_ mindblast. One that had been experimented with and refined to meet the exact needs of this situation - when Asha was fifteen and Ellana was eleven. The table rocked a little on its legs, but stayed put. Meanwhile, the chair Ellana sat in skidded several feet back, tipping backwards and sideways. Dumping her sister unceremoniously on her ass. 

Ellana sat there, skirt clinging to the sticky tavern floor, mouth opening and closing for a couple of seconds in indignation. The other people at the table fell silent and all watched Asha, wide-eyed, as she picked up her whiskey again, and took a long, long sip of it, mouth pinching at the burn while she otherwise feigned disinterest.

“I - what- did you just _mindblast_ me?! You petty little bitch! Are you _five_?!” Ellana squawked as she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees.

“Oh no!” Asha deadpanned, “and here I was, trying for a fire mine. My casting must’ve slipped.”

“ _Pala adahl’en._ ”

“Oooh, so very scary, _da’lath’in_. Ah ah ahhhh,” Asha said, raising her anchored hand as her sister came forward to retaliate, “careful now, I could open a rift right here! You don’t want to risk the wrath of Andraste by attacking one of her chosen, do yo - arghhh!”

“You are the fucking worse!” Ellana shrieked as she started to tickle her, and Asha, at a loss of what to do, started tickling back. “No one will _ever_ love you!”

“Monster!”

“ _Dahn’direlan!_ ”

“ _Felasil!_ ”

“...Abomination!”

It wasn’t, Asha reflected, the Inquisition's finest moment. But it seemed like things were turning out quite similar to all her other name days, after all.

Cullen was later than even he had expected. He opened up the door to the Herald’s Rest, and sighed with relief as the warmth from inside immediately hit his ice-cold flesh. He’d run to his room to change out of his sodden, snow-soaked clothes, but his office was getting colder by the day. He was pretty sure everything about him was numb.

He was greeted with a half-empty tavern, bar one notable exception. A mismatched line of several ill-fitting tables had been pushed to the centre of the room. The Chargers were at one end, singing their standard anthem with a new verse in dedication of the Inquisitor’s name day, while Dorian loudly criticised the poor use of meter. At the other end was Ellana, Asha, and Cassandra, all slurring drunkenly while Josie tried desperately to coax them into drinking water. Meanwhile, Varric, Sera, Blackwall, and Solas argued about something somewhere, in the No Man’s Land between. 

Cullen paused to remove his coat, watching Asha where she was slumped with her cheek against the wood. Exactly as she had looked the night she asked him whether or not he liked cats, before she had stumbled to another man’s quarters. Her hair spilled across the wooden surface like autumn leaves on a forest floor.

Not all of him was numb, then. His chest felt absurdly warm.

“You’re here!” she smiled widely and sleepily, when he tapped her lightly on the shoulder and roused her from her drunken stupor. Before he could say anything, she leveraged herself out of her chair, unsteadily, to standing. Once she finally felt safe to let go of the table, she opened her arms as wide as they could go. Then she pushed herself on her tiptoes to hug him, body all but slumping against his. 

“Oh no! You’re so cold!” she cried, like it was the greatest tragedy in the world, and tightened her arms around his neck even more. Apparently, doing so meant she reached the outermost edge of her tiptoes. A moment later she stumbled - while _standing still_ \- and he had to wrap his arms around her to stop her falling.

Drunk Asha took that as an opportunity to lean back. Again, they overbalanced. He kept one arm tight around her but braced his other on the table to stop them both from toppling over, as she placed a warm hand on either side of his freezing face. Cradling his jaw, she examined him with soft, syrupy drunk eyes. 

He went redder and redder, with more than just the change in temperature. Behind them, somewhere - for the life of him, he couldn’t look anywhere but directly at her - the Chargers began whooping and cheering.

“Bleh,” Ellana muttered, as Asha - to Cullen’s equal amusement and horror - started stroking his hair back from his face. “Told you. Mabari.”

He frowned over the Inquisitor’s shoulder. “...Asha’s a cat person,” he said, somewhat nonsensically.

“ _Bleh_.” Ellana said, with emphasis.

“I concur. I’m starting to wish this ‘secret relationship’ thing was a thing, and not just for the sake of my purse,” Dorian announced from somewhere down the table, “thirty seconds together, and look at how disgustingly happy they are.”

“Wish you groped your subordinates like that, Boss.” Bull heckled.

“Only the pretty ones, Bull!” Asha flung over her shoulder in a singsong, hands still caging Cullen’s face.

“I thought I was the prettiest,” a tipsy Cassandra grumbled.

“You arrre, Cass, don’t you worry!” 

“She is?” Cullen asked her, with a raised eyebrow, as if he was in any way in control of this situation.

Asha leant into him, body soft and boneless. “Don’t worry, you have the nicest body,” she confided in him with a soft whisper, breath tickling his ear and sending a thrill both down and up his spine - proving exactly how much he was _not_ in control of this situation, in the slightest. “And you’ve _seen_ Cassandra’s muscles, right? That’s a _verrry_ nice compliment.”

“I… I suppose it will do,” he stuttered.

“Good! It’s true! You’re so _very_ well-formed,” she grinned, kissing him on the cheek before releasing her hold. “Have some whiskey!”

“ _They drank all the whiskey,_ ” Josephine hissed in a harried voice while he took his seat.

“Yes,” he murmured back, “I was beginning to think that might be the case.”

“No. You don’t understand. _All of it._ All of Cabot’s store. Gone.”

“...Ah.”

When Cullen had agreed to making their relationship public, it was a very straightforward decision. But he now realised, with the startling benefit of hindsight, that he had not factored a Drunk Asha into that equation, at any point. She spent the next hour slumped against his side, smelling of whiskey and sandalwood, with her breath hot in his ear. As she talked, she absentmindedly stroked her fingers up and down his side, swirling circles across his shoulders and across the right side of his chest, resting her chin in the nook of his neck. She rubbed her nose along the stubble at his jawline, with a pleased hum like a cat’s purr.

It was nothing indecent - at the Chargers’ end of the table, things were rapidly descending into anarchy - but Cullen was pretty certain that his heart would give out any moment. He could only praise Andraste that Cole wasn’t there with them, giving everyone a running commentary of his very, very vivid thoughts.

At one interval, he glanced up to see Solas watching them both, his expression dark and almost… hungry, in a way that spoke volumes. Cullen hastily looked away, to listen more closely to Cassandra’s rant about Morrigan’s war room behaviour, and wrapped his arm around Asha’s waist, only partially to keep her upright.

“You’re wearing blue,” Asha informed him sleepily, when the ungodly amount of whiskey truly began to catch up with her.

“Yes, I am.”

“My favourite colour is blue.”

“Yes, it is.” The advisors’ name day gift to her had been a set of bright, sapphire blue armour, to make up for all the blue she had not been allowed to wear at the Winter Palace. It was also why he’d changed into this particular shirt - because he knew she liked it.

She nuzzled in closer and drew in a deep breath, chest pressing against his arm. “You smell nice.”

“...Thank you?” 

She wrapped her arms around him and sighed contentedly, “you’re so perfect.”

“Glad I meet your exacting standards,” he said with a wry, affectionate smile, tugging some hair behind her ear. “You are _very drunk_.

“You love it,” she mumbled, burying closer. 

“I suppose I do,” he whispered softly, wondering if she was conscious of her own word choice. He plopped a kiss on the top of her curls, heart pounding.

“We should probably get them to bed,” Josie whispered five minutes later, when neither Asha or Ellana had stirred from their places. “Can you… if you wouldn’t mind… um… oh dear.”

“I can carry her.”

“No!” Asha suddenly blurted, head snapping up, startling Cullen and damn near breaking his jaw. She looked at him, then at Josie, then back at him. 

“I need to stay with Ellana!” she said, emphatically.

“You can stay with Ellana if you want,” he told her, trying not to let his heart sink in his chest at her sudden display of panic.

“I- no - not because of _that_ ,” she said, in a slightly too loud voice that he tried not to wince at, feeling the stares of everyone still conscious in the room. “It’s,” she sighed, raking her hands through her hair, “this is my _first name day_. Well, technically third. But the other two don’t really count. Since-”

“Since you lost her,” he finished for her. “And your family.”

“I used to spend _every name day_ with my parents,” she told him, wide, blue eyes pleading with his. “You’re supposed to spend New Year with family.”

“Of course,” he said. “I understand.”

“Oh, don’t be so _fucking stupid_ , Ash,” came a slurred protest behind her, from where Ellana was resting face down on the table. Asha turned, blinking languidly in her own drunken stupor as her sister raised her head a fraction. “Let’s just get up early f’r’a vigil tomorrow morning like we planned. Parents’ll still be dead tomorrow.”

“El!”

“If you don’t leave tonight w’your smoking hot boyfriend, I _will not forgive you_ ,” Ellana announced severely, loud enough to carry across the entire tavern. Nay. Probably into the rafters. "Happy birthday to you!"

Wing-manned... by Asha’s sister. Cullen fought the urge to close his eyes and send a quick prayer to the Maker, in the hope of ever living it down. 

Ellana raised her head slightly, half her curls on one side mangled and mashed, and smiled smugly at the two of them as her chin almost missed the hand it tried to rest on. “Don’t you get it, idiot?” she told her sister, “they’re _all family_ now. Everyone here.”

The world had taken on the quality of whiskey. Warm and golden, and smoky at the edges, sloshing a little fluidly from side to side when she tried to walk. 

Asha reached out for the door handle in front of her, and the momentum caused her to stumble to the right. She heard a long, world-weary sigh, as an arm encircled her waist and tugged her upright again. “Are you _sure_ I can’t carry you?”

She looked up to see Cullen: beautiful Cullen, all golden hair and red cheeks and soft, pink mouth, looking down on her with an unnecessarily concerned look. Heat pooled in her stomach at the thought of being weightless in his arms.

“I don’t think I could handle it,” she confessed, honestly. 

She watched as he fought back an abashed grin, before schooling his face back to his normal, boring, stoic seriousness. Then, arm still holding her upright, he reached forward and opened the door for her. “Sooo very gentlemanly,” she said, with an eyeroll that, well, made her world move a bit unsteadily again.

“Soooo very necessary.” He echoed. He moved his hand to her shoulder, and pushed her through the door. 

Asha stumbled up the stairs. “D’you ever get drunk?” she asked him, genuinely curious. “You’ve seen me drunk way, way too many times. Why don’t we even things out? I’ve seen you _drink_. But you never-”

“-Make a fool of myself?”

“Ok, so, first? Rude.” She craned her head to glare down at him, and then nearly tripped over the final step, rather proving his point. “Second: yes! D’you ever just… let go? Loosen up a little? Go Wild? Have fun?”

As he also reached the top of the stair, Cullen gave a meaningful glance around her quarters, as if questioning the logic of her asking that particular question, in their particular locale. _Ok,_ Asha thought, _fair_ , before hastily clarifying the statement: “Get black-out drunk? Shit-faced? Sloshed?”

“Some of us can _handle_ our liquor, Inquisitor.”

“Booo!” 

“You make it sound like you think I’m boring,” he noted, no heat in his voice, only dry humour.

She closed the three feet distance between them and faceplanted into his chest, wrapping her arms around his tight, lean waist. “I just think you’d make a cute drunk,” she informed him, the words muffled as she buried her face in his shirt. It was rapidly becoming her favourite thing to do. He smelt _so good_.

“An accolade I have no hope of winning, in present company.”

“...It’s the lyrium, isn’t it? That’s why.”

She felt, rather than heard his sigh, as he rested his head against her hair. “In a fashion,” he said, after a beat of silence. “Templars are given lyrium to give them their magic, but also to boost their constitution. We often got told it purged our body of impurities. Of course, it's one big impurity in and of itself, but that addiction is the thing my body chases. I think, for better or worse, it raised my tolerance. Lyrium and alcohol were enough to have me feeling merry, but alcohol on its own? Without what my body is actually craving?” He sighed again. “It's yet more proof it’s not yet fully out of my system, I suppose.”

She tightened her arms around him and snuggled closer, “Ellana can steal another bottle of Golden Scythe from Blackwall for you, if you want? I can ask her. That will definitely get you trashed.”

When she felt his bark of laughter rumble through his chest, her own chest tightened in response. An unnameable emotion welled up inside her, that was so overwhelming it almost had tangible weight.

The feeling compelled her to lean back from him, move her hands back up to either side of his face. Aware she wasn’t being gentle, she tugged him down to her, claiming his lips with her own. It was sloppily done - she blamed the whiskey, not the urgency - but Cullen anchored a hand in the hair at her nape and manoeuvred their mouths into a neater position. The benefits of sobriety, Asha supposed, as she parted her lips and softened against him, happy to let him lead.

He tried to make it something languid and gentle, but she forced him to deepen it as she grabbed his shirt collar and leveraged him closer. As close as they could get. She wanted his shirt _off_ , if she was honest - in that single-minded way drunk people wanted things, without thinking through the logistics. 

If she was sober, taking off his shirt would require a conversation. About how she wouldn’t mind if certain things changed and progressed between them. But also about how she was not ready to be naked, herself. Even though she was having lots of strong feelings about nakedness around him, in general.

But thankfully, she wasn’t sober. So she moved her hands from his collar to his chest, and began to blindly undo buttons.

A small, helpless sound was made against her mouth that sizzled all the way to her fingertips, leaving her feeling as powerful as if she’d cast resurgence there and then. The kiss didn’t falter, though she felt him shudder as her hands brushed bare skin.

She had five buttons open and was fumbling with the sixth when his hands closed gently over hers and stilled her progress. They broke away from each other, panting.

“You,” he said, in a deep, throaty voice that she almost didn’t recognise, “are very drunk. Your entire mouth tastes like whiskey.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t think we should… do this. When you are drunk.”

Curse him! Curse him and his stupid, sensible, perceptive brain. Knowing that he would immediately win this argument, she made use of what little time she had by skimming her eyes down his bared chest, unmarred by bruising or poisoned stab wounds. Her mouth went dry. Gods, he was gorgeous. 

Something must’ve changed in her face, because he said in warning, “ _Asha_.”

But he could not stop her in time before she darted in and placed one, single kiss against the exposed hollow of his throat. Above her, he took a deep breath, that became a sigh when she kissed the spot again, this time open-mouthed. She felt like every one of her senses was on fire, cutting through the fog of drink. She tried to move her hands so that she could touch _something_ , but his grip on her fingers tightened. _You can’t win that easy,_ she thought smugly, and licked a line up the column of his throat.

This time, he groaned. “Maker’s breath!”

She grinned, as her lips hit the spot just under the curve of his jaw. She leaned in on tiptoe, to see if she could do something else to elicit some exciting, new response, when he hurriedly took a step back, holding her away from him at a distance. Like she was one of Sera's flasks, about to explode. 

He looked… harried. To say the least.

“Ok, ok,” she grumbled, pouting. “That wasn’t playing fair, I’ll admit.”

“...Thank the Maker you never cheated at chess.”

“Oh, I absolutely cheated at chess,” Asha told him absently-mindedly, unable to tear her eyes away from his exposed skin and remembering its taste. His chest was heaving with exertion. It wasn’t helping clear her head.

“You cheated at chess? How? When?” he looked at her looking at him, and sighed, “...I suppose now really isn’t the time.” 

He looked down at his mangled shirt, and Asha had the joy of watching his blush leak just a little down his throat.

“I should…” he shoved Asha’s hands back in her direction, and hastily began doing up buttons again, taking another step back for good measure. 

“Wait,” she said. She managed to tear her gaze away from his chest and look up to his face, to see him watching her warily. “Stay.”

Her voice was deep and rough, enough for him to freeze in his progress. “Asha...”

“I won’t-” she started. “We don’t have to-”

“- I mean, I obviously _want_ to, I’m not a monk, or a… an _idiot_ or… or blind -”

“Your tower is fucking glacial,” she blurted, stopping him mid-sentence. “It’s fucking freezing. Seriously. I feel like my fingers are going to fall off whenever I’m sat in your office for too long. At this point, I am amazed you are not a walking icicle. Stupid furry mantles can only go so far.”

Despite his flustered appearance, she was proud of him when he raised an eyebrow, “what do you mean _‘stupid’?_ ”

“Just…” she took a deep, ragged breath, “stay. Sleep here. And I mean _just_ sleep. With me. Here. In my bed. In this room. It’s… it’s warmer.”

“...That’s one word for it.”

“Please?” she asked, her voice small.

They were silent for a second, unable to look away from each other. The expression on his face was the softest yet, eyes honey gold and wanting. Even though neither of them had said certain words or made certain promises yet, she thought in that moment she heard them echoing in the space between them.

“Of course.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 😊😊😊😊😊
> 
> As always, when I stumble into writer's block, I stumble out of it by giving my characters a bunch of alcohol and seeing where the mood takes them. In Asha's case, down to the gutter. 
> 
> I'll see everyone next week! x


	73. Chapter Seventy-Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's not really a good summary for this chapter so... New Year's Day in Skyhold?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: some sexy stuff, all fade to black bc the author is a coward

When Asha dredged herself to consciousness the next morning, it took her a few moments to take stock and remember what had taken place the night before. Her head was pounding, but her mouth tasted like stale, sour elfroot. She remembered being coaxed into downing a health potion before she went to sleep. And while she felt a little worse for wear, the bed she lay in was gorgeously, wondrously warm, even as the sky outside was still creeping reluctantly towards daylight. 

She opened her eyes to find herself wrapped in strong arms. Her forehead was resting against Cullen’s collarbone, and she could feel his steady heartbeat against her skin in all the places their bodies touched.

She also realised that he had put the two of them to bed fully clothed. It seemed he really, _really_ did not trust drunk Asha.

 _Or himself,_ she thought smugly. She knew that, had she not immediately capitulated, his resistance to her demands probably wouldn’t have lasted all that long.

As she pulled herself up to sitting, his hands fell listlessly away from her body onto the mattress. She glanced down at him, to see his face smooth and unconcerned, still and serenely peaceful in sleep. She’d never seen him like that - so untroubled. She traced a light fingertip across an unlined brow. When she stroked his rumpled hair back from his face, he stirred only enough to let out a long sigh and bury himself deeper into his borrowed pillow. 

_Not bad, for an insomniac,_ she thought, with a small smile. She decided it would be cruel to wake him, and left a note folded on the pillow as she carefully snuck out to meet Ellana. 

The sun rose late and sluggishly, as the New Year was just a few days ahead of the Winter Solstice. The whole castle was silent, empty, and encased in snow. When Asha met her sister in the courtyard by her rooms, they both looked a little worse for wear, but in many ways that just added to the nostalgia as they sheltered under the largest, bare-limbed tree to perform the Rites of Remembrance. Any ceremony they performed New Year’s morning had always followed on the heels of Asha’s name day celebration the night before, sometimes with no sleep in between. One or both of them had always been hungover.

There was something oddly fitting, that the courtyard was the same pristine white as the Dalish banners that fluttered in the wind overhead. The colour of mourning. They spoke the names of the dead, said their prayers, and left small offerings to Falon’Din. Ellana, who had gone through more New Years than Asha had without their family by her side, squeezed her hand reassuringly when Asha let herself say goodbye to their parents for the first time.

When the ritual was done, both of them retreated to Ellana’s room with tea taken from the mess hall, both shivering with the cold. They sat at the small table in her sister’s quarters, nursing their cups as the snow melted from their boots. It was a mournful silence, though neither of them cried. Skyhold felt very, very big and - for a second - very, very far away from where Asha actually wanted to be.

“I miss Lavellan,” she said, finally. The words were not enough, but she knew Ellana would understand.

“I know. Me too.”

“...It’s stange,” Asha said, “it being just the two of us. Alone. Not being…”

“...Smothered by family?”

“I guess. Even we’re not together that much, anymore,” Asha looked down at her mug.

“Tell me about it. You _never_ would’ve kept a secret from me, when we were part of the clan. Now you’ve kept like… two.”

“I’m sorry,” Asha said. “I shouldn’t have - I mean, maybe I should've, with Cullen, but - I know I’m not always here. I’m... away, doing Inquisitor things, and I don’t-”

“Ash,” Ellana said, with a small smile. “You're allowed to have your own life. I've never begrudged you that."

Asha bit her lip. “...I’m sorry if I’m… needy. I realise I might seem… overbearing, or… or over-protective… Or - or if you want me to be around more, and I can’t be… you can obviously tell me, I mean, unless Corypheus is like, attacking at the gate - but even then I would come to you first -”

“You know,” her sister said, cutting across her messy, messy sentence. “I honestly never wanted anything but the life we had in the Clan. I didn’t have any complaints, whatsoever. I didn’t mind that you were the one who would lead us. I was more than happy to follow. That’s why I turned down all those proposals from other clans - I couldn’t imagine anywhere that would suit me better. I never wanted things to change.”

“Me neither,” Asha said, softly.

Ellana grimaced. “And... now… now that we don’t have a choice in the matter… well. None of the available options seem to quite fit.”

“I know what you mean.”

“No, you don’t. Not fully. You’ve made something new for yourself here. I meant that none of them seem to quite fit, _for me_. We both had the perfect place, _asa’malin_ \- we were both born into it and never had to think of leaving or finding anything better that we had to forge for ourselves. We were born into the heart of something in which we instantly belonged. It was literally your destiny to be there! Everything else that follows… it just feels like a pale imitation. I liked Hawen’s Clan, but they weren’t _my_ clan. I liked the Dales, but you weren’t there, droning on about history... and we couldn’t stay. I like it here more than those other two combined - I have you again, and all these people who care about you, we’re all working towards something great. But…”

“But?”

“...We’re never going to live in a forest again, are we?”

Asha felt the question like a punch in the gut. She hadn’t really allowed herself to think about the future beyond Corypheus. But she supposed that with Halamshiral out of the way, his defeat was another step closer towards being certain.

“I - I mean, if you wanted to… when this is over, and the anchor isn’t needed, we can-”

As she tried to summon the words, she also tried to conjure the image of Cullen living in a forest. She... couldn’t. The brutal efficiency of a military encampment was not the same as a Dalish clan, even if both involved tents. There was just... something fundamentally different, something hard to put into words... a feeling of homecoming, and belonging, and loyalty, to both a people and to an ideal, long dead - and, according to Solas, poorly translated. Regardless of whether certain types of Dalish would ever accept humans among their ranks (probably not, if Asha was being honest), she couldn’t imagine the Commander as a clansman. 

So... what then? She just left him behind, when all this was over? 

They’d only been together a few weeks. She tried to imagine abandoning him, even for the right reasons, and already her chest spasmed with pain, in an exceedingly worrying way.

“ _Ash_.”

“No.” Asha admitted, finally, “no, I don’t think we are. Going back to a forest, I mean.”

“It makes sense,” Ellana said with a shrug, like she'd already accepted it. “The two of us can’t exactly repopulate the Planasene Forest single-handedly, even if you do have a pretty, pretty man ready and willing to aid you in the effort. Things would get _very_ inbred, _very_ quickly. And living in someone else’s clan… it’s not the same. You’d never get to be a Keeper. I always wanted to see that finally happen, you know? To justify all those years of you being _fucking insufferable_ -”

“Hey!”

“You were going to be this old wise _hahren_ , telling off your apprentice because they got drunk on homebrew, and I could sidle over and say, ‘you know, she once got sloshed and serenaded her Keeper with dirty limericks she devised to remember all the lore she had to stuff herself full of - you should heard what she tried to rhyme ‘Elgar’nan’ with’. You’ve deprived me of my one meaningful goal in life!”

“T-That can hardly be your only goal!”

Ellana grinned wistfully as Asha sputtered, “honestly, I never really had any. Goals, I mean. I was waiting for the nepotism to work in my favour, maybe get myself a place as an ambassador to the other clans, or something.”

“...Y-you know,” Asha said, fighting the shake in her voice. “if you want to leave, for a bit, or... or for a little longer.... you can. For a while. D-do your own thing, away from here? I don’t want you to feel trapped here, for... for my sake...”

“Don’t worry, Ash. I don’t. I really, _really_ don’t want to leave. The only thing I do know right now is I want to stay near you, but…” Ellana shrugged again, this time a little helplessly, “what I’m saying is, I’m not sure it can be the same. We can’t live as closely here as we did, before, and I wouldn’t really want us to. I mean, we’re both changing! You’re fixing the world! Dating _shem_! I rejected _the King of Starkhaven_. We _live in a castle_!”

“...You rejected Vael?”

“Well, he never _really_ asked me, but we both know he would’ve been in love with me within the week if I’d let him,” Ellana said, brushing some imaginary dust off her shoulder. “Look. Don’t feel bad about wanting to spend some time with Cullen. In fact, I heartily recommend it - I mean, by Mythal, you made the poor guy wait long enough! And there’s no need for guilt if you need to do Inquisitor stuff or whatever, either. Things just... they just aren’t the same as they were before. The clan was the centre of both our lives, and now it's gone. You got a head-start on finding something big enough to replace it, what with your world-saving destiny and all. Maybe it’s just starting to dawn on me, that I need to find my replacement, too.”

“Oh,” Asha said, swiping a hand across her cheek to catch an errant tear. “You got any ideas?”

“What, other than my _obvious_ calling to become the most expensive courtesan in all of Val Royeux?” Ellana grinned. “I don’t know yet. Leliana talked about training me up for some stuff. So has Sera - she said I could have my Red Jenny cell, if I wanted it. Vivienne offered to make me her personal assistant, get me my own apartment in Montsimmard-”

“ _What?_ ”

“Don’t worry,” El grinned, “I like her _wayy_ more than you do, but even I told her there was no way I was taking an assistant position. Either she promotes an elf to executive status and scandalises all her precious noble friends, or I reject her offer. No points for guessing what decision she came to...”

They looked at each other, and said at the same time, “fucking Orlesians.”

“Not all of us can be mages with fancy glowing hands and Andrastian cults, but I’m sure I’ll find something,” Ellana said. “And just… don’t feel guilty, ok? We can both handle a little bit of distance. At the end of the day, even with that little bit of distance, nothing _actually_ changes between us.”

“Bollocks,” Asha muttered, swiping at her face again. “You’re going to make me cry.”

Ellana cast her a theatrically dismissive glance, eerily like Vivienne. “Pathetic.”

“ _Shut up_ ”

Ellana reached over, and squeezed her hand. “Look: there’s a nice, perfect version of Thedas somewhere out there where all the templar bullshit never happened, and you got married to a nice Sabrae girl with a really, really big sword, and we both grew old in Clan Lavellan together. If I had the option to go back there now, with Dorian’s evil-mastermind-mentor’s stupid time travel magic that I’m pretty sure you made up on the fucking spot, I’d take it in a heartbeat. But… maybe what we’ve got now is ok too.”

As Asha snuffled and fought tears, Ellana winked, “I mean, the guys are much hotter in _this_ timeline.”

Cullen was fifteen minutes late to a war room meeting.

“I - do you think - _is he ok?_ ” Josie muttered nervously. After having made Morrigan an offer of tea and had it declined, the ambassador was frankly at a loss at how she could possibly hold this meeting together.

“He was fine when I saw him,” Asha shrugged. 

Leliana gave her a sharp, knowing look, “and... when exactly did _you_ see him?”

“Oh, I-”

“I’m so sorry I’m late! I overslept!” 

Cullen rushed into the war room. His golden sheaf of hair was... curly?... and rumpled in a messy bedhead across one eye, freshly washed and only partly dry. Though he was wearing a fresh shirt, he hadn’t managed to button it all the way, of which Asha thoroughly approved. She fought a smile at his harried expression. The horror on his face at admitting a slip in punctuality was like he’d confessed to needlessly sacrificing an entire battalion. 

He saw her looking at him, and his face transformed. He flashed a wide smile that probably should’ve been illegal.

“No worries, we were waiting for you,” she said, proud when her voice remained perfectly level.

“Some of us more eagerly than others,” Leliana added. The innuendo in the Nightingale's voice was misleading. Cullen would have no idea she meant their fellow advisor - the one who shared his views on the sacred nature of punctuality.

“Oh - I-” he stuttered, glancing at Asha again then forcibly wrenching his gaze away, “well - I can promise it won’t happen again.”

“Can you?” Asha asked innocently, raising an eyebrow. She wasn’t about to let _that_ one slide.

“I - we -” he let out a heavy sigh, ears turning pink. Further down the table, Cassandra rolled her eyes at the heavens.

“Poor boy,” Morrigan announced, flicking dirt out from under her nails and sidling up from where she’d been lounging by the window like a cat in a shaft of sunlight. “Let’s put an end to his misery and get on with all... this, shall we?”

Later that day, Asha walked into dinner and took a seat in the hall at the same table as Bull, Varric, and Dorian. Her fork with its first mouthful was halfway to her mouth, when she looked up to see all three of them pinning her with a knowing stare. “....What?” she asked, warily.

“The Commander has been in a _very_ good mood today, you know,” Dorian informed her, steepling his fingers over his own empty tray. 

“Oh?”

“I’ve never seen him run through training with such vigour,” the mage confirmed, relishing the words. “Some of those poor recruits nearly cried, and when they did… he let them take… _a break_.”

“I think I even saw him smile, for like, a solid minute,” Varric confided. “A solid, unbroken minute.”

“Now, what could have happened to make him so very happy, I wonder?” Bull rumbled, raising an eyebrow. 

“Perhaps our glorious leader celebrated her name day in style?” Dorian added, leaning forward.

Asha raised one eyebrow right back at them. “Who knows?” she asked mildly, “maybe those new Antivan-stitched saddles _finally_ arrived.”

“They’ve been delayed by _another_ week, sadly,” came a voice from her elbow, and the topic of their conversation took the seat next to her. Cullen pressed a quick kiss against her cheek, oblivious to the stares tracking his movements, “I know Josie got us a deal through her ‘contacts’, but I’m pretty certain at this point that we’ve been conned.”

“Hey Curly,” Varric said. “having a good day?”

“...I can’t complain?” Cullen replied, with a slightly befuddled smile.

Asha rested her chin on her hand and examined him, along with the others. He did look… happy. And very pretty. She’d become so used to him looking pale and drained, and having bags under his eyes, that the lack of them transformed his face. It made him look a lot younger. And _prettier._

“Heard you were late to a war room meeting,” Bull said, “that’s unlike you.”

“I… overslept,” Cullen said, looking down at his plate to avoid the former- _Ben-Hassreth’s_ gaze.

“And I’m pretty sure the Void just iced over,” Varric muttered.

Asha managed to keep it together, answering questions all straight-faced and innocent, until the three of them finally left empty-handed, having unsuccessfully scrounged for gossip. Once Bull’s giant figure had ducked and disappeared beyond the doorway, however, she laughed so hard that she came close to wetting herself.

“What’s so funny?” Cullen asked, confused, “...what did I miss?”

“I… I’m sorry…” Asha gasped, wiping her eyes. “It’s just… they think… Creators…”

“What is it?”

“They think you’re in such a good mood because you _got laid!_ ” Asha whooped, snorting. At Cullen's horrified expression, she giggled again. "And all that’s _actually_ happened is that you got your first good night’s sleep in like, a year. Maybe five years, knowing you. Creators, maybe ten!”

“I - Excuse me?”

“Gods, we need to make you take a holiday,” Asha sighed, resting against his shoulder as she started to get her breath back. “If this is what a full eight-hours rest does for you… Mythal save me. You’ve been walking around with this big, shit-eating grin on your face all day.”

The horror on Cullen's face only intensified, as comprehension fully began to dawn. “I bloody knew Rylen was angling for… for something," he muttered, "When he spoke to me. Earlier.”

“...Just so you know? I think this may be the most _’you’_ thing to ever happen, ever.”

“I… I will admit, I did sleep _very_ well.”

She pressed a kiss to his temple, smiling, “that’s because you can’t feel every Frostback wind for fifty miles, in my rooms. I’m pretty certain the Underforge is warmer than your tower.”

“Yes,” he replied mildly. "That must absolutely be the _only reason_.”

“There are manifold other benefits, admittedly,” she continued, in just as light a tone. “I guess this means we’ll have to move you in with me.”

He froze for a second, then smiled, just as radiant as before - hesitant yet hopeful. "If you… if you’d like that?”

“At least for the winter,” she said, hiding the butterflies in her stomach with a wink that was more confident than she felt. “Honestly, I probably should’ve offered before now. I was running out of clothes to wear to our chess games - I’d almost reached six layers. I swear I was going to get your roof fixed as a Satinalia gift, but, well…”

“...You would’ve had to commission my men, through me, to do it?”

“It would’ve rather ruined the whole point of the gesture,” she admitted, “plus, it would’ve ridded me of a convenient excuse.”

“Excuse?”

She leaned in, and whispered, “to have you all to myself.”

Those were bold words, confidently delivered - but all that bravado was reduced to dithering when they parted for the evening, knowing they’d meet up again later that night. Cullen, predictably, had to work late, making up for his unprecedented lie-in -because one night’s sleep did not cure him of his personality. That meant Asha had several hours of hastily tidying her room - cringing over what a mess it had been when he escorted her back the night before - and of curling up in an armchair by the fire, pretending to read a book, in a room that contained no one but herself. 

It was _Sword and Shields_ , and there was a hot lady with a big sword, but she hadn’t made it past the third chapter. She wasn’t even really seeing the words. _I should’ve got wine,_ she thought. But then the nerves in her stomach were replaced by queasiness, reminding her of her hangover. She could only treat one or the other, not both.

The book was open in her lap, and she was reduced to worrying at a hangnail, when she heard footsteps on her stairs. Cullen arrived, looking about as awkward as she felt, and she saw he held a familiar-looking box, the one that held his chessboard. “I… know it’s late already,” he said, as she struggled out from where she’d slumped in her chair, “but I thought we might both… um… need the distraction. Until this feels a little more… normal.”

“Gods, yes.” she said, already clearing documents off her coffee table.

He was completely right, of course. It took only a few rounds for Asha’s surroundings to melt away, and for the game to completely absorb her. She was getting _so very close_ to winning, these days. She knew it was starting to be a challenge for Cullen as well: they would often both fall silent for stretches of time, too focused to be able to keep a conversation flowing. She had learned that Cullen had a particular kind of frown, when she made a particularly vexing kind of move that meant his King was in danger.

She was toying with a lock of hair and worrying her lip, trying to work out if moving her Arishok would sabotage her three turns down the line, when she glanced up to find him staring at her. Her first instinct was to be self-conscious and look away, but she didn't need to do that anymore. Instead she found herself smiling, tilting her head coyly. “What?”

“...It just occurred to me,” Cullen said, “I’m not sure I’ve ever told you how beautiful you are.”

 _Unfair_. Asha’s pulse immediately rocketed. Acting as if he hadn’t just triggered a heart-attack, Cullen broke eye contact briefly, to lean in and casually moved a chess piece, before continuing, “it’s pretty much all I think about, of course. A running commentary in my head, that some would perhaps call tiresome. But then, you don’t know that. You’re not Cole. So I figured I should probably just tell you, at some point, and now seemed just as good as any."

Then he leaned back, met her eyes, and said, “checkmate.”

“I - you - how - you - you _bastard!_ I had a _strategy!_ ” Asha looked from the board, to his face, to the board again, back to his face. “Did you toy with me - draw out the game - just so you could _deliver that line?_ ”

“No, actually,” he replied, dryly. “I just realised that I’d been holding out on ending the game, because I love watching you when you think. Then it occured to me... I’m about to sleep in your bed. There are far better things I could be admiring. So it seemed prudent to end the game as quickly as possible, and to simply say what I was thinking out loud.”

“...You did not just flirt with me using the word ‘prudent’, you insufferable git.”

“I regret introducing you to chess. You’re a sore loser.”

“And feeding me victory lines makes _you_ a sore winner!”

“I - it wasn’t a line,” he sighed, then smiled, in a way that softened his face and created a warm, molten feeling in Asha’s chest. “You’re beautiful. I just wanted to say it.”

“Oh.”

“Why… did it work? As a line?” 

“...Maybe.” Asha huffed a flustered breath while he chuckled. 

She started putting the pieces back in the box, and when he joined her in tidying it away, their hands brushed. Asha wasn’t quite sure how it happened - but from that initial, electrifying burst of contact, it seemed to make utter sense for her to suddenly be moving. Moving around the table. Knocking her shin on the corner with a small curse. Not letting the pain halt her progress as she placed her hands on his shoulders, moved one of her knees, and sunk into his armchair on top of him. 

He might have tugged her down to meet him. The movement might have caught him completely by surprise. He might have even had something to say about the matter, had she not already been kissing him. 

Kissing Cullen always made her feel powerful, even when it was the sweetest and gentlest of touches. This wasn’t sweet or gentle. This was her, straddled across his lap, pushing him back into the chair as she stroked up his shoulders to his neck to his jaw to his hair. Their bodies were welded together, and every part of him was just brilliantly warm. She felt his fingertips burning through her shirt where they anchored her on either side of her waist. Always so safe, never touching anywhere above that point, for the risk of skimming too high. She thought she might one day love him for that, but right now she just wanted him _to touch her_. His grip felt like it was too little, too… too _prudent_. Anchoring her in place, but also - she was pretty sure - holding her away from him. Or at least from certain parts of him. She wiggled herself to try and move forward, more fully into his lap, and her suspicions were confirmed. Rather than resting gently, his hands suddenly clamped down on her waist and held her firmly in place, preventing her from closing the distance.

Asha was pretty certain this was a fight she could win. She let out a small protest when Cullen tried to break to kiss, and instead bit his lip to prevent him from moving back. His resistance lasted an exceedingly valiant... _two seconds_ , and then he was pulled back to her with a groan, mouth pliant and searching. Her hand brushed his chest, skimmed across a collarbone, before yanking on his shirt collar and placing her hand on the warm skin underneath. A brilliant move on her part, she thought, as she felt him shudder and then gasp. His pulse thundered under her fingers as she bit lightly into the flesh at his neck, then nursed the spot, and began to map out the new expanse of bare skin, fingers splaying just above a nipple. She pressed him back and down into the chair cushions - he complied. She pinned all her weight on him, and decided to press the advantage further. But, when she tried to move her hips again, he immediately locked her in place with that death grip on her waist, and broke away, panting. “Wait, wait,” he said.

“Gods,” Asha groaned, dropping her head onto his shoulder, “why do you have to be so _sensible_?”

“Look, this conversation isn’t going to be as painful as you think it’s going to be.”

“Oh? Pray tell.”

“Asha,” he said, his voice rough with both desire and - as was becoming habitual, it seemed - frustration. She finally opened her eyes, to see him watching her, eyes dark and wanting, pupils blown. But the first emotion she could identify in his face was still… care. Concern. “Look. I know where your brand is.”

She thought of all the places he’d touched her, and all the places he’d deliberately avoided. “I know you do.”

“Leliana told us where it was, after you showed it to her,” he explained. 

“I guessed that she probably did that.”

“And I know you don’t… you don’t want me to touch it. Or… see it?”

“No,” she said. Her breath was beginning to even out again, but her heart was still pounding in her chest, a thrill that seemed half anxiety, half excitement. “I… it’s not just you. I… I wore a vest. Before. With Skinner.”

“Well. Ok, then.”

“Ok?”

Cullen smiled at her. That heartbreakingly pretty, untroubled smile that struck Asha right to her heart. The smile she’d probably loved a little, even from the very beginning. That he could give that smile to her now, and seem so unconcerned about the boundaries she put in place... Those boundaries were supposed to guard and protect her from outside invaders. Yet he could accept them without thought, without judgement, and in doing so it was as if he'd taken up some kind of mantle to protect her as well. It made her feel safe. 

_Safe with a templar_ \- the irony was not lost on her for a moment.

She thought her expression probably changed, in the most embarrassing way. Cullen pressed a kiss to her brow. To her cheek. The corner of her mouth. Her jaw, just beneath her ear lobe. Her breath caught and stuttered in her throat. She arched backwards almost without thought, and then his lips trailed down her neck, to her collarbone, then back up to just by her ear. A hand trailed, ever so gently, under her shirt. The heat and the slight chill of air made her jump, just because it was new, and they both stilled for a moment before his fingers renewed their journey. They traced along the curve of her hip and waist, burning through the thin vest she wore. The almost indeterminable edge of his nails raked gently across her stomach. His hand splayed across the front of her ribcage, dwarfing her body. His thumb brushed the barest, beginning curve of a breast.

“I know where your brand is,” he repeated, in a murmur, directly into her ear. “Which means I know all the places it isn’t...”

“Mmhmmm?” Words were kind of beyond her, at that point.

“...Can I touch those?”

Asha felt a thrill down her spine. Before she could stop herself, words tumbled from her mouth, almost without her permission. Words that sounded like they came from someone very, very different from her. 

“Maybe. If you say please.”

She heard his sharp intake of breath as his grip slackened slightly. She sunk more fully into his lap, then gasped herself. She felt him smile against her neck, teeth grazing along her skin.

“Asha. _Please_.”

Asha thought she might combust on the spot. The Creators had clearly decided to give Cullen Rutherford an awkward personality, because if he’d been confident alongside everything else, then she imagined world domination would’ve been firmly within his wheelhouse. That voice, at that pitch, was just… sinful.

But more importantly, _she_ was the one making him like this. _She_ was one making him desperate to touch her, but also care enough to ask for permission. 

“Gods,” she whispered, desperately, dragging his mouth back up to hers. “ _Yes._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: this fic hasn't passed the bechdel test in a while, I should add more interaction between the main female characters  
> Also Me: but... but... KISSING 🥺 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed the chapter!! Sorry there is only one this week: the UK is on fire again. And it actually works out best for the pacing if the pair chapters become odd number updates again, so... see you next weekend!! xxxx


	74. Chapter Seventy-Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cole's personal quest.

The next few weeks they spent waiting for the roads to Emprise du Lion to become passable were not _all_ spent in various states of nakedness with Cullen, as much as Asha wished that was the case.

Two weeks after New Year, Cullen’s Antivan-stitched saddles actually arrived, along with the Rivaini amulet they’d long ago ordered for Cole. An idea that Solas had resisted, and which they’d pursued during his long absence after Wisdom’s death. Asha had decided to overrule his judgement on the matter: it had seemed more… pressing, now that she knew that it didn't just take the wrong hands to make spirits into demons - anyone could do it if they tried hard enough.

The pass to Redcliffe was still operating, so when something that called to Cole had caused the amulet to falter and claimed his focus, Asha had been able to convince the advisors to let her _let him_ follow it. The spirit had spent so many months as her emotional crutch, unasked, that Asha probably would’ve snuck out of the castle if they’d banned her from going, and they all knew it. She just wanted to feel like their friendship was more equal, and to get one step towards repaying everything Cole had done for her in the last year.

What followed afterwards… well.

When they got back to Skyhold, Solas still wasn’t speaking with her.

 _And to be honest,_ Asha thought, as she read her reports next to Dorian in his little reading nook, rather than her normal place at Solas’ desk, _fuck him._

She wasn’t going to apologise for something that she didn’t regret in the slightest.

“You’re sure the bog witch said ‘Arbor Wilds’?” Dorian said with a sigh, snapping another book shut and placing it on top of the tall and now unsteady pile of discarded tomes at his side.

“Dorian,” said Asha, “if Morrigan is a 'bog witch', I’m some kind of swamp… thing.”

“Even you would never wear a skirt made entirely of _belts_.”

“But yes, she said Arbor WIlds,” Asha told him, “the Temple of Mythal. I’ve… there’s myths about it, of course, but they’re just… myths. Well. Myths with some very obvious, but very unhelpful, supporting evidence. Everyone who strays too far into the forest looking for it disappears. Hence…”

“...No location on any given map, once you get to ‘here be death traps’,” the mage huffed, picking up another book. “I’ve drained Skyhold’s library dry, and even Vivi and Fiona’s contacts can’t seem to find me anything. We could just wait for Corypheus’ army to go on the move and follow their lead but that means…”

“Being one step behind them the whole time,” Asha finished for him.

“Goodness! If only there was _someone_ we could talk to! With vast knowledge about ancient elvhen culture! Who could potentially tap into the Fade and contact lingering spirits of wisdom and knowledge! Or even perhaps the spirits of the lost and dead themselves! If only they weren’t _sulking_ via community art project...”

Asha glared at Dorian over the top of her own papers, which were nearly spilling out of her lap at the inconvenience of doing this review without a table. She supposed she could sneak to Cullen’s office and review them there, but the likelihood of her actually getting any work done with him there was very slim.

“If you want Solas’ help,” she said, “you’re welcome to ask him.”

“Unfortunately, my powers of persuasion have never really worked on him.”

“Well, he’s actively pissed at _me_ ,” Asha replied. “So take this one for the team, Pavus.”

“But _you_ find his speeches quaint and endearing, rather than arrogant and insufferable.”

“I’m a elvish Keeper literally dedicated to Mythal,” she countered, making a gesture towards her face and its _vallaslin_. “I’ll understand the shorthand notes with no trouble. You should be the one to get knowledge directly from the source, _shem_.”

“...You can’t just keep avoiding him. Particularly when you’re both sharing _my_ library, and glaring at each other loudly enough to interrupt my reading.”

“I can, and I fucking will,” she said.

“Wonderful. _Very_ mature. Exactly how I imagined a saint should behave.”

“Not a saint yet. Val Royeaux blocked my election, on account of the knife-ears.”

“Will you _please_ just go and ask him to help us with this? You can’t pretend that you’re not interested!” 

Asha stubbornly stayed planted in her chair. But the next morning, when she returned to the nook, she found a stack of books, elvhen manuscripts, and a map piled up against one wall. Dorian took his own seat with a raised eyebrow, which spoke volumes regarding the wisdom of bitching about someone at full volume, while they resided one floor down, in a round tower where sound carried.

Even with the map, everything remained stubbornly incomplete. The map - hastily drawn, out of proportion enough to clearly not be a cartographer’s work, and suspiciously new compared to all the ancient texts she’d been scouring - listed hazards, but without stating explicitly what they were. The books made mention of tests and unknown peril, but again remained either deliberately cryptic or frustratingly poetic.

“Ok, I’ll bite,” she said, striding into the rotunda as the defeat of being the first to break the silence stung into her like venom. She’d waited until Dorian had left the library, just so the entire thing didn’t have _witnesses_. She flicked the map she had unfurled with her middle finger, so it made a snapping sound, “what the fuck is this, and how did you draw it? What do you know?”

Solas was a picture of icy unconcern when he glanced over his shoulder, from where he balanced atop a ladder. The front of his tunic was smeared with paint, and there was also a smudge the same blue as Celene’s dress across his brow. “So, you deign to take my council now, _lethallan?_ ”

Asha’s eyes widened as he turned back towards his mural. She’d never… had Solas ever been _rude_ to her, before? He’d been an ass on the topic of the Dalish. But never to _her_ , personally. A flash of affronted fury flared through her as she gazed up at his turned back. 

“Is this really how it’s going to be? Do you want to argue, or do you want to help me stop Corypheus?”

“I have given you everything you need to make your decision,” he replied blandly, back still turned. “And you will make it, regardless of what I say further.”

“Oh, so you _do_ want to argue,” Asha said. “Well then, do you mind if we get it out of the way now, then, please? Because I need to discuss this with my expert on the Elvhenan, not some petty child.”

Her deliberate provocation had the desired effect. His shoulders tensed, and slowly, silently, he descended down the ladder. Every movement was precise, the tension behind a coiled spring. He put his palette down, then levelled a venomous glare at her. “You think my grievance _petty_ , then?”

“Resenting a choice after it’s been made, as if that will do anything to change it, is the refuge of a narrow mind, not a wise one,” she countered.

“You speak of Wisdom?” he said, “how dare you?”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t have the right to invoke its name. Even after what you witnessed in the Dales. After you claimed to _understand_. You _still_ dared to twist and turn a spirit against its own nature. You saw what disaster that wrought in my friend. And yet you did it anyway.”

“... Cole is different, Solas. I didn’t change him, he changed himself. The emotion he was experiencing was something of his own design. He isn’t just a spirit anymore - he hasn’t been since before he came to us. The two situations aren’t the same.”

“Oh? I suppose they are not,” the words were sharp as knives, and just as unfeeling. “When I wanted revenge for a hurt dealt to me and mine, you stopped me and preached mercy. But when it’s a _templar_ that stands in the crossfire, suddenly vengeance is perfectly _acceptable_ avenue to pursue no matter who or what it sullies -”

“Oh, _fuck you_. You really think Varric was going to advocate an all-out blood-letting? Did you miss the part where Cole _didn’t actually kill him?_ ”

“As if you cared either way. You let your own selfish vendettas corrupt a spirit of compassion, and just because chance left you conveniently innocent doesn’t mean I won’t hold you accountable.”

Injustice at that accusation roiled through Asha's body like a living thing, separate from the fury but stoking it like oil poured directly on a flame. 

“You... you _idiot_ ,” she seethed. “You honestly think that’s what I did? That that’s the choice I made? You… you act like you know everything, but you know _nothing_. You… you fucking…”

She trailed off, incoherent, red lancing across her vision. She was angry, and _hurt_. How could Solas ever think that of her? 

It was becoming hard to breathe, and there was no one to make the ache better, to puncture it and force it to deflate. It just rose higher and higher in her chest, pressing against her ribs. 

It was up to her to handle it. Alone.

“I… I need to _leave_ ,” she hissed, blindly moving towards the nearest door.

“No. You don’t get to walk away from this,” he said, hand closing down around her wrist, hard enough to tug her back. “You wanted to argue? Let’s argue. I cannot believe you’d ever do something this irresponsible! You acted as though you were different. I thought you understood. Some things are sacred. When a spirit of compassion crossed over from the Fade and took over Cole’s body, it had no idea what it was doing. It was an unintentional mistake. A violence to its very being. A violation you could’ve remedied and undone - and instead you perpetuated it. For what? Another templar corpse? Narrow ideals about what it means to be a living being? You perverted Compassion’s purpose!”

“How? He can still help people, as a person!”

“You didn’t _think_.”

“Oh, didn’t I?” she retorted, “you _honestly_ believe I just blindly flung my friend at a templar like wood on a pyre for… what? The entertainment value? Are you _actually an idiot?_ ”

In the periphery of her vision, she noticed the dark shadows of heads popping over the sides of the balconies above. There were a few people remaining in the library, and it seemed they now constituted an audience.

Solas regarded her coolly, his composure barely even ruffled. “Oh, so we’re resorting to insults now.”

“ _I’m angry!_ ” she shouted, eloquently. It echoed up to the rafters. “And you know what? Cole was angry too. _That_ was what was perverting his purpose. Shoving it all away and denying it would’ve been meaningless. People are allowed to hurt for what’s been done to them, Solas! I know better than anyone that erasing that pain doesn’t make it go away! I was still terrified of templars, when I was in tranquil form, even if I never showed it, or the brand meant I couldn’t process the emotion -”

“Spirits aren’t like people.”

“And Cole _isn’t like other spirits_!”

Solas let out a huff of frustration that became nearly a snarl, almost as if he was resenting having to even explain to her. As if he expected her to immediately capitulate and apologise profusely for her mistake. 

She _hadn’t made a mistake._

He ran a hand across his face (smudging the paint), and then turned back to her, narrowing his eyes. Finding a weakness.

“You speak of your fear of templars as if it is universal,” he said, bitingly. The voice that came out of him was as furious as her own, but ice cold rather than hot. “How does your _Commander_ feel about you actively endorsing the murder of a fellow comrade in arms, for the evil, unjust crimes he perpetrated against mages? How does he feel about you hating and punishing his own people, when you refuse to try anyone in your own jail cells?”

Asha narrowed her eyes. _Oh, you bastard._

“They’re not ‘his people’,” she ground out, “And not that it is _any of your business_ , but I’ve already spoken with Cullen about it. I explained, and talked him through my reasoning, which is more than you’ve let me do here.”

“And I suppose it was painless? He didn’t challenge you on any of it? Did he dare question your logic - with his no doubt _boundless_ , accurate, and Chantry-sanctioned expertise on the nature and manner of spirits, into which Cole fits, perfectly?" Acidic sarcasm laced Solas' tone. "Or did he slink into a corner and keep quiet, lest his dissent undo whatever nonsensical blessing earned him your favour, and you put him straight back in with all the other templars you immediately hate and want to sentence to death?”

Why, exactly, had this gotten so weirdly personal? Asha didn’t really care. It didn’t change the fact that Solas was being an utter dick.

“Oh, fuck off, Solas. Cullen isn’t a templar anymore. Shockingly, _some_ people _change and grow_. I’m doing it. Cullen has been doing it for longer than I have. And now Cole can too. And maybe, just maybe, ‘my Commander’ accepted my explanation, because he is an adult man with an adult intellect, who appreciates my ability to make an intelligent, informed decisions independently, and doesn’t talk down to me like I’m a child every time I do something he just so happens to dislike!” she retorted, her voice rising with ever harried breath. “And let me tell you this for free - I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t be in love with him if it was otherwise!”

At that bellowed pronouncement, they both fell silent. 

Solas was just… looking at her, unable to summon a retort. The only sound in the library was their hurried, angered breathing - oh, and someone, probably a poor requisition officer who’d been forced to work overtime and then become unwilling witness to this shouting match, dropping a pen, somewhere in the upper levels. 

_Huh, I’ve never said that aloud before,_ Asha thought, as she glared at Solas’ shuttered face and dared him to make any kind of comment on her confession. She’d never really let herself think it, truth be told.

When the silence continued, she spoke again, her voice low. “And let me tell you this, if you’d perhaps care to listen: I made the decision I made, in Redcliffe, because I _wanted_ Cole to remain a spirit.”

A little bit of fury left his piercing gaze, and he became confused, as if he thought he’d misheard her. “I don’t understand.”

“No, that’s right, you really fucking don’t,” she growled. “Asking Cole to stay as a spirit was the _selfish_ decision for me to make, in that situation. I was fucking _terrified_ , when he left with Varric. Do you have any idea what changing his nature means, for me?"

When Solas remained silent, she actually relished the way that the next words carried through the rotunda. "The only thing I’ve found that cures my mood swings. Gone. The only spirit I know that could have the power and be immediately on-hand, to bring me back if I lose the anchor in battle and turn tranquil again. Gone.”

She felt a cruel twist of satisfaction as the horror and comprehension began to show in Solas’ face. Another moment where she had thought of something he hadn’t. She stored it as a tally in her mind, and cherished the victory as she went in for the killing blow.

“But I have used that poor boy like a crutch for months. He’s always been there. Never complained. Never asked for anything. Always given up his time and his very self for me without question, because that’s _in his nature_. And I’ve taken advantage of that, and told myself it’s all right to do so, for far too long. The one single thing he’s ever shown he wants for himself, and yes, I gave it to him. Because _unlike some people_ , I am not some self-righteous prick who twists everything to the benefits of my own worldview.”

While Solas stood there, mouth slightly parted as if he was also waiting for a response to come to him, she moved over and slapped the map on the table.

“Congratulations. You are now in charge of all preparations for the Arbor Wilds,” she said in a hard, emotionless voice. “I leave for Sahrnia next week, so I need to delegate. You will _not_ be coming with me. If there’s any way to stop Mythal’s Temple from being totally desecrated, I really would appreciate it.”

Then, she glanced up, and glared as several faces retracted as quickly as they could manage, which was: not quickly enough. In the high up, shadowed edges of the Nightingale’s rookery, one person didn’t bother trying to hide herself at all. Asha caught a fall of bright red hair from within an otherwise featureless hood. 

“Leliana!” she shouted up at her spectator, “if word reaches Cullen that I love him from anyone's mouth other than my own, I’ll hold you personally responsible!”

“Such a pronouncement could lead one to question the wisdom of shouting such things in public spaces but… understood, Inquisitor.” came the frustratingly calm reply that echoed through the rotunda, as Asha, on her tide of brilliant fury, stomped out without letting Solas say another word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, I'm posting this with a massive tension headache after the most stressful Dungeons and Dragons session of my life (I say, as if this week didn't have so many other unique and deliciously crunchy ways to make my stress levels go through the roof, *cough* US election *cough*). So anyway apologies for typos, my heartrate has been in the cardio zone for nearly three hours straight while I'm just sat still at my desk.
> 
> Also, apologies people who are here for Solavellan, my feelings on certain parts of Solas' character and its flaws are beginning to assert themselves!!


	75. Chapter Seventy-Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just two people, hanging out by a lake!! :D

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: some sexy stuff but all very tame and fade to black

“Any particular reason for this trip?” Asha asked, though she already knew the answer. For Cullen to propose a spontaneous journey away from Skyhold, the day _before_ the two of them and three units of troops embarked for Emprise du Lion? There had to be a reason. She was surprised his brain hadn’t haemorrhaged from the notion of last-minute delegation alone. Random, unexpected kisses aside, ‘spontaneous’ was not really a word she associated with Cullen Rutherford.

“You were the one who said I needed a holiday,” he pointed out from his seat opposite, in the small, rickety carriage that made every bump felt as it trundled across the icy roads. Both their horses were resting up in preparation for travel to Orlais, so they’d taken a coach to their destination. “I was going to send some correspondence to finalise some dealings in Redcliffe, but we can take the day. It is the best I could manage, given that we’re still in the middle of a war.”

“Leliana told you about the fight, didn’t she?”

“...She may have mentioned it, yes,” he admitted, “although I would like to point out that I… _did_ notice.”

Asha got a flashback to when she had stormed from the rotunda, gone and hit some things for a while, then ran into Cullen on her way to the baths, physically exhausted but _still incredibly pissed_. And then she'd just… yanked him into a storage room off of the main staircase, and angrily kissed him within an inch of his life. 

In what had followed, he’d lost several buttons from his shirt.

“What a master of deduction you are,” she grinned. "Did Leliana tell you… anything else? About the fight?”

“Only that you could stand some time away,” he replied. “I’d already thought about it. The travel to Sahrnia will hardly constitute a break. It’s not much, but we are about to start fighting Samson’s army in earnest. I wanted to take you away from that, if only for a moment.”

So… Leliana hadn’t told him any of what she or Solas had said during their argument. But the intent of her spymaster was clear: the Nightingale’s concession to secrecy was to arrange for the both of them to have a romantic getaway because, even with her powers of intimidation, gossip surrounding confessions of love could only be stifled for so long. Especially when everyone lived in the same castle, and one of those people happened to be Ellana Lavellan.

Could she tell him? Asha bit her lip, nerves coiling and uncoiling in her stomach at the thought.

“...I hope the dispute can be resolved,” Cullen said suddenly, startling her out of her reverie. “With Solas. I know the two of you are… close.”

Asha glanced up at him, at his face which was kept carefully impassive, and then, in a snap decision, moved quickly so that she snuck into the tiny space next to him on his seat. The two of them smushed up into the bench, as he made room for her, and once they were something approaching comfortable she smoothed down her hair and rested her head on his shoulder, lacing the fingers of their closest hands together.

“There’s nothing to be resolved at my end. Not to brag, but I think I won the argument. Whatever he needs to work through, he can do it on his own."

"Why was he angry?"

"It was the same stuff about Cole, and that… man, in Redcliffe,” she told him. 

“The fact that you made Cole… more… human?”

“He misunderstood my motivations. He also... said some pretty shitty things. And I don’t think all of them were about Cole. I’m still trying to unpick that, honestly.”

“He was… jealous?” Cullen hazarded, looking down at their intertwined hands and stroking his thumb across her knuckles.

She blinked at him, “how did you know? I never expected him to ever act like that. It was _awful_.”

“I noticed there’s been some changes in the way he acts. Nothing too obtrusive, and I can only blame him so much. If the tables were turned… I can’t imagine I’d be taking it well. I’d probably be a little jealous, too. I was, a little, in the beginning, mostly because I couldn’t seem to talk to you without making you hate me. I like to think I hid it better.”

“As the Inquisitor, I’m thinking about instituting some laws,” Asha mused aloud, “about how jealous a person is allowed to be, when they were the one to do the rejecting.”

“Wait, _he_ rejected _you?_ ” Cullen sounded genuinely surprised, which Asha supposed was flattering. “...Then forget everything I just said. Fuck him. What an absolute pillock. How can you even stand being friends with him?”

Asha laughed delightedly, while Cullen looked pleased to have startled that reaction out of her. “It worked out in your favour though, didn’t it?” she teased. “I thought that would make you like him more. He has no right pretending to be competition.”

“I mean…” Cullen frowned, “if he hurt you-”

“I wasn’t that cut up about it at the time. Or… I guess I got over what I thought I felt for him very, _very_ quickly. In hindsight. I think maybe I gravitated towards him because he felt... familiar? Safe. I was so lost at the beginning, and he was the closest thing I had to the Dalish in the Inquisition. He’s one of my closest friends. Maybe I just automatically assumed it was something more than that, because of the circumstances,” Asha sighed, squeezing his hand. “But honestly, what I felt for him, it really doesn’t compare to what I feel for…”

She halted, realising what she had been about to admit. Cullen glanced down at her, fighting a smile. “What you feel for…? Cats? Whiskey? Magic swords?”

She hid from his gaze, and buried her head in his shoulder, “please don’t make me say it. It’s so embarrassing having to talk about feelings.”

“Yes, yes, please save me from this terrible fate of being complimented,” he deadpanned. 

“Oh, come on, you know what I was going to say anyway, and you’re just as awkward as me! ...How about this? As trade, you can avoid saying something you don’t want to say, in the future.”

“This doesn’t quite strike me as a fair trade at all.”

Asha kissed him. “There,” she said, some minutes later, “that should sweeten the deal.”

It was drizzly and miserable. Asha supposed she couldn’t exactly hope for much more than that, from Ferelden in what they called Wintermarch. The sky above was sullen. The snow turned to sludge turned to slick mud, the earth sodden through with thawing frost as they descended down the mountain. Not the most romantic scenery - but she found that, when wrapped in her cloak and dozing on Cullen’s shoulder, she didn’t really mind.

The errands he bought her on took all of two hours, and could definitely have been delegated to an underling if he’d wanted them to be. He finalised a few trade deals with the villages close to Skyhold for the months to come, conferred and re-established the priorities for scouts along the Imperial Highway. She hovered by his side as they happened, and people snuck wide-eyed glances at the Inquisitor that she pretended not to notice, while green light brimmed over the cuff of her glove on her anchored hand.

It was quiet and calm. Understated. Comfortable, in a new and novel way. Even so, when he stopped the carriage the final time, the view that greeted them was anticlimactic, given the way he gently handed her down to the road and gave her a bashful, hopeful smile, like he was letting her in on some kind of secret. He’d brought her to a dirt track that skirted the lake’s edge. They walked up to the onyx dark water of Lake Calenhad, up to a lone jetty that was rickety, weather-worn and subsiding, one side dipping down in water in a way that would have only looked marginally out of place on the Fallow Mire.

“...Where are we?” Asha asked, tentatively. She wanted to be immediately bowled over, but… it was very dark. And grey. And _cold_.

“Somewhere quiet.”

She smiled despite herself, “that’s not really an answer.”

“I don’t know its name. I don’t think it has one. It’s a place I stopped at once, travelling with my family. Our carriage wheel broke, and I came down here to steal a moment of peace. And then, when I was on my way to train - this was as far as they travelled with me, before I carried on alone,” he pointed out across the water, to nothing, as the horizon was choked with mist. “The Circle is at the opposite end of the Lake, almost exactly. The one time I managed to take leave, I travelled here on horseback again. No real destination. But when I made it all the way back here, I realised that it had been my goal all along. Things were brewing in Ostagar by then, my family had already left Honnleath as the first marauding bands arrived. This was the closest I could get to them.”

“Huh,” Asha said, coming to stand next to him, “that’s almost... Dalish of you.”

“You still don’t sound very impressed.”

“I am working on the assumption that it’s much nicer, when the sky is blue,” she answered honestly, looking out across the still water, and beginning to see the appeal… a little. “ I’m not going to be one to judge, if you were happy here.”

“I was. I still am. I know it isn’t much. But it’s one of those places you convince yourself only you know about. A pocket of calm that no one else can touch.”

“I can appreciate that, at least.” she said, then nudged his shoulder, “thank you for bringing me, then. Letting me invade.”

“...You’re not invading. Why wouldn’t I want to share it with you?” he replied, sounding genuinely bemused by that assumption. 

Asha felt her heart lift in her chest, not a little painfully. She was seeing a mirror of herself, stood in the Fade with Solas, offering up a little part of herself that no one else had. 

_I love this man,_ she thought, as she took his hand silently. 

“What happened at Kinloch,” she asked, “it didn’t ruin this place for you?”

“That’s... a good question. I came here once when I first joined the Inquisition - we’re about a day’s ride from Haven. I will admit it felt a little strange. When I was leaving to become a trainee, I looked across the water, imagined I could see the tower, and I thought that was where I wanted to be. But…” he sighed, “coming here now, I think it's not about where I’m heading, but where I’ve been. The memories. The _good_ ones. This was a place I shared with my family. I felt so certain then, and somehow I feel that same certainty whenever I’m here. And… I don’t know. I just think it’s pretty.”

“Hey, I get it! …Not about it being pretty. I think you have to be Ferelden born and raised to be coerced into that delusion,” she grinned unrepentantly as he rolled his eyes. “But.... if I could go back to the place where the massacre happened, I would in a heartbeat. It wouldn’t be perfect but… the good outweighs the bad.”

“The good outweighs the bad,” Cullen echoed, and he was looking at her as he said it. The feeling in her chest grew bigger and bigger, until it felt like it was about to burst.

 _Say it_ , she told herself. 

But blurting it out unprompted felt like it would only result in embarrassment.

Instead, she looked out across the water, trying to see it through his eyes. The water was a calm mirror to the smoky sky above, and stretched out uninterrupted for miles in all directions. She wondered how deep it was. She could imagine it in summer, fresh and inviting. A breeze (a fucking freezing one) kissed through her hair. It grew very quiet, until all she could hear was Cullen’s breathing, and all she felt was his pulse through her palm.

She hummed, closed her eyes and let out a long sigh as some of the tension left her shoulders. “Ok. I think I understand.”

“I just thought… you used to find Skyhold constricting. I know we’re far away from your home, and your life here is very different from the one you used to live. This was the nicest piece of wilderness I could think of, close by.” she heard the pleased smile in his voice without opening his eyes. “I’d certainly hoped you’d like it. Considering you won’t let a word be said against the Storm Coast, I thought it likely. At least it’s _dry_ here.”

“Yes, I suppose Fereldan does set a rather low bar,” she replied, smirking even as her eyes remained shut.

“That’s not fair. The Frostbacks are beautiful.”

“...I think Skyhold is technically in Orlais, last time Josie checked.”

They were silent for a few more minutes. Cullen broke the peace first. When she blinked her eyes open again, he was rummaging in his pocket. “The last time I was here,” he said, as she watched him, “my brother gave me this.”

He held out his palm, and a small silver circle rested in it. . “He just had it in his pocket,” Cullen told her, “I’m _pretty certain_ he’d forgotten to get me a leaving present, and panicked when Mia handed me a chess set.”

“But you've kept it?”

“He said it was for luck.” he replied, “I didn’t have the heart to tell him that templars aren’t supposed to carry such things. Our faith is supposed to be enough to carry us through.”

“Oh gods, Cullen. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be on-brand for this to be the full extent of your teenage rebellion…”

“I did do _other things_ , Asha,” he sighed, “Perhaps I'll tell you about them, at a time when I’m not trying to have a serious moment.”

“-I’d say I’m sorry, but you know I absolutely couldn’t let that slide.”

He smiled, reluctantly, “I suppose not. But this particular case is a little different, you see. That first day, I thought I would pretend to take it with me, so I wouldn’t hurt his feelings. Spend it on something useful in the next town along the road, go to the academy with no blasphemous items on my person. But… I couldn’t seem to let it go.”

“Your brother gave it to you. It would have been a little cruel to get rid of it.”

“Yes, but it was something more than that. I wanted to believe it would guide me. That it meant my family were somehow watching over me. Even though Bran was about as far from a guardian spirit as you could get. He had as much faith and spiritualism in him as a saucepan. But… it felt both right and wrong to keep it with me. It’s the only thing I took from Ferelden that didn't come from the Order. A little bit of doubt, sowed there from the very beginning.”

Honestly, Asha couldn’t help but fight the feeling that he just… sounded homesick. Maybe it had grown into more than that, but that was the problem at the very root of whatever he felt now. 

“We should go see your family, when this is over,” she told him.

“...‘We’?”

“W-well, obviously, you don’t have to take me with you.” She blushed at how he’d immediately latched onto her wording. “But you _do_ have to go see them. You just… you sound like you miss them, a lot, and have done for years. I’m too Dalish for my automatic answer to not be strong-arming you to their door and then guarding it for a week until you’ve caught up with every single one of them and told them all that you love them, multiple times. Not that I could strong-arm you, in the slightest.”

“Maybe I’d let you.” Cullen said quietly. “I’d - I’d like you to meet them. For them to meet _you_.”

“When all this is over?”

“When all this is over.”

Even she could tell that was some kind of promise. She looked down at his hand. “So, was your brother right? ...Have you been lucky? Would you say?”

“I should’ve died at Kinloch. Or Kirkwall. Or Haven. Adamant. Take your pick. There are so many awful paths my life could’ve taken. I won’t claim it's perfect, but I feel lucky and privileged to have made it this far.”

“I feel the same.” She thought about how she’d happened to be saved from tranquility. 

“Also, I can’t help but feel that things _are_ looking up. Just a little.”

“True,” she grinned. “I mean, we stopped the assassin no problem, minor stabbings aside, and Morrigan _has_ an eluvian, while Corypheus is still scratching his arse looking for one in a place that happens to belong _my_ goddess -”

“-Asha. I meant _you_. I feel very, very lucky, to have had even a chance to be with you.”

“Oh.” she cleared her throat, “well. That’s nice.”

“Isn’t it just?” he fought a smile. Then, he brought her hand up, and deposited the coin in her palm, kissed her fingers as he closed them around its weight. “Here. I didn’t get you a nameday gift.”

“Yes you did! My armour is gorgeous.”

“I didn’t get you a _romantic_ nameday gift.”

“I’m not going to lie, I bloody love that armour.”

“Just… humour me?”

She looked at the coin where it now rested in her hand, heart in her throat. “...Does this mean I can like, root out one of Ellana’s old friendship bracelets, and-”

“ _Asha._ ”

“Sorry!” she gulped. “I’m a little nervous.”

“Why on earth would you be nervous?”

 _Because we are so totally in love, you ass._ she thought. “...What if I like you being lucky? What if I want the streak to continue?”

“Well, I’m not one to be selfish, but if that’s a problem for you, maybe you could dedicate some of your luck towards that endeavour. Protect _me_ in battle, for a change?”

“Oh, fuck off!” she said, nervousness immediately forgotten, “I _saved your life_ in Adamant, you ass! You would be fucking paste if-”

The next words were silenced when he kissed her. She sighed and immediately surrendered, melting against him as his hand stroked up her cold, reddened cheek and buried in her hair, pulling him towards her. _I love you,_ she thought, as she wrapped her arms round his neck and bowed herself backwards. _I love you,_ she thought, as his tongue tangled with hers and his thumb caressed her cheek and she felt his heart thundering in time with hers. 

_I love you_.

It suddenly wasn’t as scary anymore.

But still she didn’t say it, even as they broke apart. The sky above was looking a little overcast, and Cullen took a step back, folding her fingers over the coin with a quick glance over to where their abandoned carriage and its driver rested as a distant speck on the road in the distance. He’d said what he wanted her to say. That was the moment he’d been trying to create for her, all of it, and he wasn’t going to push for words he didn't expect. Their day of peace was almost at an end.

Asha looked across the water, at this piece of himself he’d given to her. She didn’t want to do what Solas had done, and let this moment come to a painful and abrupt close. She… she wanted to do something for him. She wanted to make this a lasting memory for him as well. To 'add to the good.' She wanted to… 

Asha grinned as inspiration struck. As Cullen tried to break away and start back in the direction of the carriage, she caught his hand and tugged him back. She placed the coin in the centre of his palm, and closed his fingers over it in a mirror of his own gesture, leaving him looking extremely confused.

“I’m promise I’m going to keep it,” she said. “But you might want to look after it, for now. You clearly have the pockets for it, and I don’t want to risk losing the thing.”

“...Losing it?” he asked. “How would you do that?”

She looked out across the water. It _was_ inviting, she told herself with conviction, and willed herself to believe it. She loved lake swimming. Even if she wished that they were visiting in the summer. 

Then, she began unbuttoning her shirt.

“W-what are you doing?” she could’ve laughed at how extremely concerned Cullen suddenly sounded.

“You brought me to a pretty lake, Cullen. Dearest. _Ma vhenan’ara_.” She said, continuing with buttons. She finished, and removed her cloak, and then her shirt, leaving her in her thin camisole. Immediately goose flesh rippled up her arms in a wave, but she tried not to let it deter her. “You’re a smart man. One of the smartest. Were we ever really just going to _look_ at it? Did you _really_ not have any other plans? What did you think was going to happen? Have you _met me_?”

“You… you can’t be serious! Skinny dipping? _Here?_ It’s… it’s fucking Wintermarch!”

He sounded scandalised enough to make Asha laugh. “And I’ve swam in the Waking Sea at the Storm Coast. _Twice_.”

Standing in her vest, she reached down and began unlacing her trousers. She actually felt him lock up in her periphery, even though it wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before, and she glanced up, grinning. “Don’t worry,” she said, in a voice she pitched as knowing and just a little seductive. “You can just watch. You don’t have to join me... if you don’t want to.”

“I bloody well will, if I have to fish your frostbitten corpse out of the water.”

“Aww, such a sweet-talker,” she shucked her breeches down off her legs, taking her boots with them, and she heard Cullen take a sharp breath. She tried to find it flattering and take heart. By that point, in her vest and smalls, she was shivering. She hoped she wasn’t turning blue, because she had a feeling that would impact on the sexiness of the whole endeavour. She also fought the urge to cross her hands over her bare chest, for that same reason - it was a _good thing_ the thin material masked nothing. 

Cullen didn’t seem to know where to look, which was adorable. Who knew public nudity would be enough to make him bashful again, after everything they’d done in the last few weeks? And she was still wearing clothes! 

“Asha…”

“Don’t worry,” she smiled, “I know I don’t always think these things through, but the Dalish actually have this one down to a fine art. I have a cunning plan.”

One arm outstretched, she focused briefly, and raised a wall of fire underneath the water.

There was a flare of colour in the depths, and tendrils of arcane fire kissed the water’s surface like alcohol when set alight. There was a brief sizzling, and she let the spell drop after twenty seconds. She didn't know quite how arcane fire worked, but it wouldn’t boil the lake, or anything, simply raise the temperature to bearable. And much, much warmer than the actual air. How else did he think the Dalish bathed in winter? 

“No frostbitten corpses today!” she smiled, taking a step forward to stand so that her toes were off the very edge of the jetty. She threw a look back over her shoulder and winked at him. “But if you’re still too chicken to join me, _vhenan’ara_ , I absolutely understand.”

She turned back, looked out across the still, endless water. Then, with her back to Cullen, her heart in her mouth, and her hands shaking…

...Asha reached down, fingered the hem of her vest, and peeled it off over her head.

It was off in a matter of seconds. She hastily dumped the scrap of fabric on the jetty, hoping it would stay dry. She wasn’t wearing a breast band. She didn’t really need to, and often the combination with a vest just itched, unbearably. 

Which... meant her back was bare.

 _All_ of her back was bare. She pulled her hair over one shoulder to make sure.

She took two breaths, trying to force air into her lungs as she felt just a little edge of panic, underneath everything. She could feel his eyes on her. Or maybe it was just her imagining the path of his gaze across her skin, coming to rest between her shoulder blades. Would he even be able to look at it, or would he avert his gaze, out of respect or shame or… distaste?

Asha has no idea how ugly the brand actually was these days. It wasn’t exactly something she liked to check in on. 

She had goosebumps, everywhere. She swallowed against a very dry mouth. She was shaking, and it wasn’t to do with the cold. She felt very, very vulnerable, and she had to pretend she didn’t, for both their sakes. Even though she knew he would be able to tell every single thought running through her head. She needed him to know them, even if they went unspoken, in order to understand what she was trying to tell him.

“A-Asha…”

She heard Cullen’s voice, shaky, behind her. But by then, she’d taken all the time she could for the sake of theatrics. It was just _too fucking cold_. She raised her arms above her head, and dived off the edge of the pier.

It was a fluid arc, plunging her deep underwater. Newly tepid lakewater filled her mouth, but despite the dark colour of the surface it didn’t actually taste unpleasant. There was a moment of weightless silence, and then she breached the surface. Immediately, every exposed part of her - her damp skin and wet hair - was fucking freezing, as it came into contact with the frigid air. She summoned a flashfire in her hands just under the water surface, close to her body, to make sure the water near her maintained a pleasant temperature. She shook out her hair like a wet dog. 

“The perks of being a mage!” she shouted over her shoulder, looking at Cullen with a smile that was only a little forced. The lake was actually, genuinely, lovely, now that she was in it. It was just deep enough that when she submerged up to her shoulders her feet brushed up against velvety silt, that would probably be gross once she actually saw what it did to her toes. “I’m just saying, it might be warmer in here, than out there.”

Cullen was still stood on the pier, looking a little shaken. And utterly unable to take his eyes off her, even though she was now submerged from the neck down.

She quirked an eyebrow. “Come on, Commander. Live a little! I’ll even look the other way, to preserve your modesty.” She turned in the water, to face the horizon, bobbing weightlessly as she treaded water. After a couple of seconds, she began to hear the rustle of clothing, and fought a triumphant grin. She was pretty sure the Void had just frozen over again.

A couple of seconds later, and she dared to sneak a peek behind her. She knew the Creators would understand - there were more than a few myths that catalogued peeking at hot people while they bathed, and she hadn’t actually promised to _stay_ looking the other way the whole time. 

Only, her covert glance didn’t end up being sneaky, because she ended up engrossed in the sight of a very, very naked Cullen Rutherford. Even as he began to shiver and clearly regret his life choices, she was rendered dry mouthed by the acres of chiselled muscle, dusted in fine golden hair. At her appreciative sound, he glanced up, managing to look dignified, a little unimpressed, and utterly gorgeous, even with his trousers tangled around his ankles.

“Cold, is it?” she asked, innocently, her mouth twitching to fight a giggle at his answering glare.

“You should’ve taken your underwear off as well,” he informed her, in clipped tones.

“That’s a bit forward,” she replied - as if she wasn’t now obviously, unashamedly staring at his naked body, and he wasn’t obviously, unashamedly aware.

“They’re going to be wet when you get out of there, you idiot. You’ll soak through all your clothes.”

“Can… can you hear what you’re saying? I just - I _have_ to know if that was deliberate.”

“It’ll be _bloody freezing_.”

“Well. I suppose I just won’t wear them on the carriage ride back, then,” she replied with an unrepentant grin, and then she shrieked as he dived into the lake after her, sending a splash of much colder, unheated water in her direction 

By the time she caught a glimpse of the pale shape of him moving under the water and resurfacing, he already had his arms locked around her waist from behind. Blood began to pound through her at the feel of all his warm, slick skin against hers. Their legs tangled together as they kicked to stay afloat.

He pressed a kiss against her shoulder, water dripping from his toffee dark hair. There was a pause, and then his mouth moved a little. When she felt a tiny, timid press of lips on her spine - not against her brand, thank the Creators, but above it, on a patch of skin he still would have never seen before. She startled and fought the urge to lock up. He paused as well, clearly gauging whether the gesture was ok. 

It was a small, painless acknowledgement. Silent, unspoken, and gentle. She slowly let her body soften against his. He nuzzled against the nape of her neck. Shivering with the new sensation, on skin she’d left untouched for nearly a year, Asha found that she couldn’t fight a smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So like, I rewatched the video game scenes for this, and do we think that in the game world, Cullen Rutherford, romancer extraordinaire, simply takes the Inquisitor to the fucking Fallow Mire? Nothing says 'true love' like corpses rising from the water!!
> 
> I hope everyone enjoyed this, I embellished a little bit to fit the situation and did some really dumb stuff with water to justify Asha's skinny dipping obsession. All in the name of good content.
> 
> Just a heads up - we've had a run of very fluffy chapters, but if the fact that Asha and Cullen are about to go on a tour of Red Templar Orlais isn't clue enough, I've unfortunately had to return to the actual plot of this long fic. What's covered in the next few chapters and in the final act is going to be angsty once more!! I've been adding in some fluffier chapters to counterbalance but let's be honest, at this point in 2020 I feel like angst might also need a content warning. Just know that whatever happens from this point onwards will eventually have a happy ending.
> 
> (it's just now that they're together I can do actual real proper hurt/comfort so...)


	76. Chapter Seventy-Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Inquisitor arrives at Emprise du Lion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: graphic violence, body horror

Well. There was no way to sugarcoat it. 

Asha fell off a cliff.

It was a half misstep, half push. She wavered slightly, fighting for balance. 

The red templar kicked her off a four-story scaffold, onto the craggy rocks of the quarry below.

Asha teetered for a terrible moment on the edge, fought to keep balance, but the once-woman placed a distended, slightly lumpy foot on her torso and forced her backwards, into empty air. Asha's opponent was now over seven feet tall, and _heavy_ , a fissure of red lyrium crystals running up her left shoulder and back, buckling the steel armour. The Inquisitor didn’t stand a chance.

“Asha!” She heard Cullen’s terrified shout. She saw the shape of him trying to duck round the templar he was engaged with. And then the ground fell away - or rather, she fell away from it.

She dropped like a lead weight. There was a moment of breathlessness, that she couldn’t really afford. Then she began desperately spinning a disruption field as she plummeted. The rocky ground, veined through with red lyrium like capillaries under pale skin, rushed up to meet her. At the last moment, its advance suddenly slowed. The magical distortion of time and gravity ballooned up to meet her like a cushion, preventing her from a very messy death. She was still winded as her momentum abruptly halted and she drifted to the ground - but thankfully she didn’t go splat. 

Asha pressed her cheek into the frozen dirt for a second, letting out a huff of frosted breath as she allowed the spell to slip from her grasp. _That was… bad,_ she thought, in that tiny moment of peaceful relief. Then she heard an animalistic screech from above, and rolled hastily out of the way. Just in time, as the self-same red templar who’d thrown her off the scaffold suddenly thudded onto and _into_ the ground, with no spell to cushion her fall. Parts of her shattered.

A glance up, and she could see Cullen’s blonde head peeking over the edge into the quarry. He'd been the one to throw the woman off after her. _Ok, so that’s just showing off,_ Asha thought. She waved up at him, to signal that she was ok, and would’ve called him out for salting her wounds, had a red templar not charged at her from the right and offered to give her more for her troubles.

Sahrnia was _crawling_ with templars. Like an anthill straight from Asha’s nightmares. When they’d arrived two days prior and Dorian, shivering in three jackets and a cloak, had said, “Mountains. Cold. ‘Let's bring Dorian!’ Are you lot trying to _torture_ me?” Asha had shot him a glare so venomous that it rendered him silent for nearly ten minutes.

She was trying to stop the fear getting to her, but she hadn't slept properly since they left Skyhold. This was the first time she’d faced the red templars in force, since they’d overrun Haven. When she’d glanced up towards Cullen that morning - bright, clear light illuminating the weave of their tent canvas as she dredged herself out of a restless doze where she was pressed against his chest - she could see the unspoken words in his eyes. The silence outside told them that the blizzards had subsided. Morning had dawned clear enough for them to know that today was the day they had the best chance of liberating the quarry. Their bodies wrapped around each other, their shared bedrolls in a tangle from the way she’d tossed and turned and no doubt prevented him from sleeping as well, she could tell he wanted to offer to let her stay behind. 

But he knew better than to ask. And as much as Asha wanted to stay in that tent, with him, and bury them both under blankets until spring, she wouldn’t let herself.

Only now she was here, getting kicked off scaffolds. And the _lyrium_ … In the heart of the quarry, with it crawling up the walls on all sides, she could feel the heat of it crawling up her skin in turn, like a slick, clammy fever, wheedling its way under her clothes. She had a headache. Her mouth was dry and furry, like she had a killer hangover. She was fighting templars. It was not a good day.

She should’ve taken the snuggly, half-naked under blankets option.

She struggled to her feet and Valour flared to life in her hands, as she met the next templar that rushed her. His sword, a massive two-handed monstrosity, crashed down, but Valour didn’t waver under the weight as she parried, arms shuddering as she fended off the blow. Behind him was another cage of villagers, their gaunt faces watching out between the bars, with an expression that suggested that they didn’t dare let themselves hope. She shoved the soldier to the side with a punch from her barrier, and there was a warm ember glow along the seam of his remaining armour as she plunged Valour through the meat (rock?) of his shoulder. There was no blood, and it was off-centre enough to not cause serious injury, but the templar fell to his knee with the pain as she pulled the blade free with no resistance.

“Apostate… Abomination...” the templar rasped, in a voice bone dry with disuse. He choked on the word, like speaking through a throat of red lyrium caused him pain. 

Still, it caused her to freeze up. Did she recognise that voice?

Fear thrilled through Asha’s chest in an instinctual ripple. The voice sounded familiar. But surely that was pure imagination? It was so far from human - the templar was too far gone in the process of transformation. And yet… she’d still only found two of the templars who had been responsible for Lavellan’s demise. There were a lot more of them out there. In theory, the number of Red Templars left for her to encounter was being thinned out by her own hand.

Maybe it was only the… _sentiment_ that was familiar, though. Having apostate flung at her face seemed like it would be standard for any templar interactions. She shook herself from her daze as the guard tried to stand again. _It doesn’t matter_. Whether or not she knew him, he was still dead. Before he had a chance to recover, she shook herself free from the thought, and with a clear light ring of Valour she decapitated him in one fell swoop. His helmeted head tumbled towards the foot of the cage, shedding crystals as it went.

She started towards the cages.

Only she was the first person to make it into the heart of the quarry, by means of catastrophic near-death experiences. Which meant that, when she took three steps, three more red templars emerged from a tunnel in the hillside, their sights all trained on her.

“ _Fen’harel ver na,_ ” Asha uttered, and then she fade-stepped backwards and away from the cage before all three of them were upon her, crowding the space she’d just vacated. One of them spotted her trajectory, and roared, and that was when the fear properly kicked in. It seemed that what falling off a cliff couldn’t achieve, angry templars could. Hands shaking, Asha fade-stepped again, off to the left onto one of the ridges for a chance at some higher ground. She had no idea where the others were, though she would frankly hope they were coming to her aid.

“Kill her!” bellowed the knight in a gravelly tone, and then they charged for her. In a flash, Asha was in her past again, helpless, trembling.

Only… not powerless.

The was a sound like a whip crack around them as ice mines sapped what little moisture there was out of the already frigid air. The first of the templars stepped on it, and one of their legs, entirely made of crystal, shattered at the joint when they tried to tug it free. The others continued onwards while their comrade floundered, but then Asha raised her other hand and ripped a fade rift open in the sky above their heads. She watched with undeniable pleasure as it sapped at the approaching warriors and disintegrated the friend still stuck in her mines to dust.

_They haven’t even touched me,_ she thought dizzily. And already one was dead.

She whirled into action. Valour blazed at her side and guided her hand forward. These days, she would trust it to lead her with her eyes closed. She arched the blade up and shoved it under the jaw of a slow, lumbering templar made lethargic by the rift, watching the point protrude from the back of its lyrium skull. The next met her blow, before she stabbed it through the stomach, watching it fall. Triumphant.

Then, something heavy clubbed her over the back of the head.

Asha felt herself rolling, though her vision was black. She tasted blood in her mouth from where she’d bitten her tongue. And still she was tumbling… falling... She’d been batted off the slope.

She reached out a hand desperately as her vision wavered and returned, trying to brace herself on something to stop her fall -

Her hand blindly grasped onto something: a chunk of simmering red lyrium, three feet tall, protruding from a jagged vein in the ground. Her whole left side collided with it as she came to a halt.

Searing nerve pain shot through her entire left arm, followed by just… crashing numbness, tingling like pins and needles, and immediate nausea that soured her stomach to the point where she could taste bile. Her vision doubled, and then it settled into strange, icy clarity. She let go of the rock as if her hand had been burnt, and scrambled backwards, just as the red templar shadow that had snuck up on her brought down its own jagged arm, bludgeoning her across the face.

“ _Lavellan… monster…_ ” it rasped, in a voice barely there. “ _Pretender to the throne of the Elder One. Should’ve… died…_ ”

Her arm was already numb, anyway. Asha reached out blindly, made contact with the thing’s taloned arm, then poured an entire chain lightning spell directly into its body.

It screamed. 

The spell was way more powerful than she expected it to be. The purple energy churned up the shadow's form, and the places where skin still existed became corded with sick, plum coloured veins. It dropped. The body inert, just a… lump. A thing.

_It knew me._

More shouts. More templars. But all Asha could see was red.

Soon, all she was aware of was Valour at her side, the starlight blade churning brighter and brighter with scorching light as she dealt more and more damage. She threw down fire mines, then ice mines, then a static cage. 

“Asha!” There was a shout from somewhere near her, as she ran Valour through a red templar’s chest. Gold and red… for a second, she thought it was just another templar. But it was Cullen standing on the opposite side of the quarry, on the scaffold. There was a second in which he watched her fight, open mouthed, and then he launched himself at the fray, dropping from two stories above the ground. She didn’t stop to see him roll up to standing. The world in front of her exploded as her latest set of fire mines flung two templars backwards, and she then cleaved the remaining assailant in two.

“Get the villagers!” she shouted blindly in the Commander’s direction, even as another templar pounced on her and she, with a grunt, threw it back with a mindblast that sent it careening off into the air. The horror soared upwards, then hit the side of the quarry, fifteen feet up. It’s back snapped and crystals shattered, before it fell limp like a ragdoll and tumbled to the ground. 

Woah. Not a bad mindblast.

She lost Cullen in the fray, as she threw down another set of mines. Her hand itched - she felt the urge to open up another rift and watched them drift to dust. And she would’ve done… except for the man suddenly by her side. 

“I told you to get the villagers!”

“You think I’m leaving you?” Cullen demanded, “ _With templars?_ ”

Asha lifted a hand, and another templar fell with a shriek as lightning danced along the ground. She cast him a meaningful look.

“I’m _not_ leaving you.” 

There was a sudden flare of fury in her stomach, sourceless and strong. _Did he think she was weak?_

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” she muttered, gritting her teeth. “ _I can handle it_.”

The hand she already had raised crushed inwards in a fist, and suddenly, the cage holding the villagers exploded.

Well, the door did. Asha supposed that if he insisted on staying with her, a fire mine would have to do the job for the both of them. She couldn’t stand the thought of those people in a cage.

Cullen blinked for a second, as if struggling to see the connecting the two events. Then, seeing the ground smoulder, he cast a quick sidelong glance at her. “...What did you…?” 

“Get down,” she grunted, and when he ducked, she speared an approaching templar through the face.

The rest of the battle was a blur. In stark contrast to the first time they’d fought, she was managing to get to the kills before he did. She supposed Valour was half the weight, and her unarmoured form moved so fluidly she could barely keep track of the time. Her mana seemed relentless, as she threw up barriers and cast down mines and Valour burned brighter and brighter in her hand, searing white that reflected off the snow and ice and lyrium. She felt graceful, deadly, and _angry_.

“ _Abomination_ ,” rasped a guard. “I remember your face. My dreams. You’re in my…”

That voice… now, _that_ voice was familiar.

“You,” Asha replied, “I’ll keep you.”

And then her blade sliced through the red templars knees. Valour sheared clean through, as the once-knight started screaming and tumbled face first into the dirt, unable to hold its weight.

“Keep it alive,” she ordered Cullen, charging forward. She saw Cole by the cage, helping scared villagers as they scrambled out of the twisted, warped metal. Her fire mines had set the beams of the scaffold above on fire, and the structure was beginning to collapse.

When the last body fell - by Cullen’s sword, not Asha’s, as she was melting the lock on the final cage - he cast a wary glance over at her. 

Finally, the mana seemed to have drained out of her, but it had lasted far longer than he ever could’ve imagined possible, even with all her months of training. He _knew_ she didn’t take lyrium potions.

Whereas Asha had used to lock up and shut down at a mention of the Order, now she was burning fiercely, fighting as if her fear could be washed away with blood - though there was very little blood here, in a place that had turned all flesh to crystal. That didn’t worry him. Watching her move, he couldn’t help but feel proud, remembering the wan girl that had quailed from him in the war room. Now, in front of him, he saw a warrior that he knew could probably defeat him easily, broken ribs and all. 

But it was the… ferocity. Even as she had began to flag, it had seemed like she wasn’t able to stop. 

She caught him staring, and looked up. She scraped a hand across her forehead, and dragged a line of soot across her skin. The left side of her face was swelling, and her lip was split from a blow she’d taken, but other than that he couldn’t remember seeing her injured. 

“What is it?”

“Are you… ok?”

“Cullen.” she said. And then she gestured around the cavern, to the bodies of templars, and then at the cage.

“...Fair point.” he said - but that wasn’t exactly what he’d meant. 

The lock fell away in a pile of molten metal, sizzling on the cold ground. Had he ever seen a fire spell burn so bright before? Asha swung the door open, and tired, haggard looking villagers swarmed out, already babbling their praises to her in Orlesian she wouldn’t understand.

“They’re thanking you. And… they're asking if the... the ‘Gardener’ is still in Suledin Keep,” Cullen translated, with a frown. “They want to know if Sahrnia is safe.”

Asha stood up from where she’d crouched, working on the door. She looked over the group of men. “You’re safe now. We’re pushing the Red Templars out of Sahrnia,” she said over the clamour of their voices, “we’ll get you back-”

She stopped, frowning, and then Cullen was darting forward as she wavered dizzily on her feet and nearly swooned. She slumped against his chest, eyes almost fluttering shut.

“I’ll say it again,” he said a few seconds later as she blinked up at him, the movement syrupy and dazed, “Are you ok?

She tried to take her own weight, shuddered, and gave up, “...Tired, I think. That was. A lot.” 

He gently pushed sweat soaked hair from her face. “I can imagine.”

“They… they knew me… some of them, they were Clan Lavellan people, I’m sure of it… even though their faces were gone...”

“Yes, well, there’s a man with no legs, that we can conveniently interrogate about that.”

“Ew.” When Cullen frowned, she blinked again, “Oh shit. Did I…?”

“...Yes. That was you.”

Asha’s already pale face turned paler. 

“His legs were red lyrium, if that’s any consolation. You took away his mobility, but I don’t think there was any flesh to pain.” 

He tried to keep his voice dispassionate, like he was reciting a war room statistic. Really, it was hardly the worst thing he’d seen in battle, and he was half-convinced that Bull’s Chargers got up to more brutal activities for recreation. But, somehow, delivering it in that voice seemed to make it worse for her to hear. She shuddered again, and pushed herself up to standing. “I’m sorry.”

“Why are you apologising?”

“I - I’m not -” she huffed, “I mean - if they’re dead, I’m not really sorry, and it might be because they’re templars - _my_ templars, I mean, not...” 

She trailed off, frowning, like she was struggling to recall something. Her gaze drifted a little before refocusing, as he brushed some hair from her face. 

“That’s ok. You have nothing to apologise for.”

“You’re not… scared of me?” she said, in the tiniest voice.

“No,” Cullen told her, a little relieved to find his words were honest - and then hating himself for that relief. “I’m not scared. I’m not angry or worried. I don’t even think your actions were unreasonable, given the situation.” 

_...Just out of character,_ he realised. _That_ was what scared him. Knowing what they knew about tranquility and its effect on people’s emotions, Asha’s mood swings were now completely explainable, but also more troubling. It didn’t have anything to do with his or anybody else’s safety, just his Inquisitor’s wellbeing. Cullen knew how much she valued her own sense of control.

She gave a weak smile. He saw that she’d been bracing herself for his reaction, too. “...You sure?”

Was he? 

At the end of the day, she’d managed to free all the prisoners in Sahrnia in one afternoon. Would he have been anything other than pleased and desperately proud, if such achievements had been made against the blood mages in Adamant? Probably not.

“We knew you meeting templars was going to be hard. You did amazingly,” he told her, and that sentence held no ounce of doubt. “But… no more falling off scaffolds.”

“No more falling off scaffolds,” she echoed, then she leant in and sealed a swift kiss over his lips. The act seemed to surprise them both. When she pulled back, he could tell she was worried she'd done the wrong thing. He supposed if you’d told him six months ago that he’d be kissing Asha Lavellan amongst a pile of templar corpses and not being counted among them, he wouldn’t have believed it. 

Cullen righted her to standing, before taking her arm for support. “Let’s go interrogate your prisoner. See what he knows about Lavellan - and this Gardener.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys!! Sorry, I know you've been waiting a while for a chapter, and I'm not even sure this one is worth it!
> 
> I was ill last week and had a really busy day yesterday. I will be posting another chapter either today or tomorrow, and hopefully no other unplanned hiatuses will be taking place in the near future.


	77. Chapter Seventy-Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Gardener of Suledin Keep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: angst guys. so much angst.

“‘I was - I was in Kirkwall when Meredith died.’” Cullen’s voice echoed off the stone walls as he read the text aloud, “‘She drew upon the red lyrium in her sword, and was consumed by it. Yet here we are, taking power from the lyrium and still alive. Fornier says in the early days, many were lost to the madness too quickly. We must use it enough so that it changes us, but not so much that it destroys us. He thinks... Imshael is the key.’”

When Cullen trailed off, reading the rest silently, Asha cleared her throat. “Another one from Kirkwall. Do you recognise the handwriting?” she asked, with her mouth tasting like ashes. 

“...I don’t,” Cullen admitted, grim-faced. He handed the leather-bound journal over. They were both taut with tension, not quite managing to look each other directly in the eye, and the meaning behind his words passed unspoken between them. If this person was from Kirkwall… they were probably one of hers. _Another_ one of hers. The names Connal and Hayden had been familiar. She could vividly recall the cold face of Lieutenant Erasmus, in a flash of clarity after Dorian had voiced the name, and seeing his death by red lyrium written down in a sentence like a dry statistic for a history book had left her shaking. 

The red templar she’d kept alive… their face had been too disfigured to identify, and they didn’t remember their own name. But they’d known _her._ Like Reagan, they spouted claims that she was a punishment, perfectly tailored to fit their sins. Unlike Reagan, they’d had no fury, and broken down in sobs. The truth poured out of them, as their brittle crystal face fractured further with each pained cry.

They were all in Suledin Keep, the prisoner had said. The ones that didn’t die, or kill themselves, or run away nameless and forgotten. This blight-ridden nightmare of horrors and shadows and behemoths comprised the ruins of where the templar faction who’d murdered Clan Lavellan had ended up.

When the red templar had given up everything it knew, Asha had tried to kill them. But her hand was shaking too badly, and she couldn’t raise or summon Valour. 

Cullen had done it, after reciting some lines of Chantry scripture. Asha had walked off and vomited, away from the corpse.

A day later, she looked over this nameless templar’s final diary entry dispassionately. It was dated two months prior.

If she had just taken Suledin Keep earlier…

All these people, that she’d wanted to choke the life out of with her bare hands… now all she could find of them were their whispered ghosts and tortured testimonials, inscribed in ink. They had suffered deaths that sounded painful and cruel, but she’d never get to witness them. They hadn’t had the decency to stay alive long enough to let her kill them herself. To see their lifeless eyes and cold bodies, and know they could never hurt her or haunt her again.

“I don’t recognise the name Fornier.” Was all she managed to say.

“Doubtless he’s from the Orlesian sect,” Cullen replied. Another undercurrent of meaning: _he wouldn’t have any reason to be stationed near the Planasene Forest._ Not one of hers, then.

Asha nodded, then passed it across to Bull. “Put it in the bag with the rest of the evidence.”

“Yes, boss.”

“There’s another one of those fucking giants, by the way. I can feel the walls shaking with its footsteps,” came Dorian’s voice from up the stairs, looking out on the courtyard. “Just in case you felt like today couldn’t get _more fun_.”

“Are you ok?” Cole put his hand on Asha’s arm, tentatively, then dropped it immediately when she startled. “You are not ok.”

“Not really, no.”

“I didn’t kill the man who hurt me, and I’m ok.”

“That… actually helps a little. Thanks.”

“...Will stabbing a giant also help?”

Asha smiled tiredly, though it felt forced. “Only one way to find out.”

They carved their way through Suledin Keep. Everything that attacked them was too deformed by lyrium to identify. Most of them were too far gone even for speech. As they battled knights and horrors and shadows, and behemoth after behemoth, Asha found herself shouting, demanding their names until her voice was hoarse. But none of them could reply. She could be avenging every lost member of her family as she plunged Valour through brittle crystal to reach the last remnants of flesh, but she had no way of knowing.

And _the fucking lyrium._ As it had done in the quarry, it gave her a sick feeling that set her teeth on edge. Her arm had recovered from touching the vein back in Sahrnia, and she wasn’t hearing any songs, corrupted or otherwise/ But Gods… there was something about it…

“There can’t be much more of this place to go,” Cullen said, looking tired and drawn as he brushed a fine layer of red dust from his armour. She supposed there was a torture in this tailored to him, as well, cutting down former brothers at arms. He looked out across the littered shards of red lyrium. “I wish that there was some way to-”

He stopped, and she saw enough guilt written on his face to guess where that sentence was about to end. _Some way to avoid killing them. Some way to reverse the change red lyrium had wrought in these people._ Only of course, the people he was wanting to save were the very people she wanted vengeance on.

“I wish we could reverse it too,” she said. She’d meant to be reassuring, it came out flat instead. “Then at least I’d know who’s even _here_ -” 

“I’m just worried,” he told her, “we have no way of knowing who was turned. This Gardener… he was _experimenting_ on them. There’s so many of them, they can’t _all be_ responsible for Lavellan’s-”

Asha felt instinctive hackles rise, then fought to quell them. He was right. With so many red templars, at least some of them were probably innocent of the crimes she wanted to hold against their names, if not outright coerced into becoming the monsters they now were. Still, she only had so much sympathy to share with strangers, as her head pounded and her mouth tasted like bile and they, well, _tried to kill her._

“And the ones who are responsible can’t even be brought to justice,” she said, bitterly. “This is just… an act of mindless violence to meet another act of mindless violence. I can’t even ask them _why_...”

“Not sure they needed a reason, Boss.” Bull said. “And right now, neither do we. Hesitation will just get us all killed.”

Only they did hesitate. When they burst through into the next room, and all Asha could see was a single man, dressed in apostate robes.

It was the last thing she expected to see, here in the heart of a Red Templar stronghold where ‘apostate’ seemed to be the only word left in anyone’s vocabulary. The man glanced up at them, unruffled, mildly polite, and unconcerned. He was plain-looking, unremarkable apart from how pale he was even against the snow, dark bruise-like shadows under his eyes. Asha watched as his eyes caught onto her, specifically, and latched on. She couldn’t shake the feeling like they bore into her, with a hunger that didn’t seem quite recognisable as human.

“Come now, come now, don’t be shy,” he said, beckoning them closer. When none of them moved closer, he smiled, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Yeah, cause when mages say that, it always goes well,” Bull grunted.

“He’s not a mage. He’s a demon,” said Cole, his voice shaded with a touch of accusation.

“Ah, ah, ahhh. _Spirit_ , not demon. I’m a spirit of choice. Imshael, if you will. If you get to pick your moniker and walk around in a meat suit unmolested, Compassion, I think I earn that privilege too.”

Cullen and Asha shared a look, which conveyed, pretty much, _I hate all of this._

The demon - Imshael - was still watching her, though, even as it mocked and provoked Cole. It noticed the moment when her gaze alighted on it once more, and contorted its features into a smile. “My, my, look at you. The little Lavellan girl. I never thought I’d meet you here, of all places. The hero of this latest act in Thedas’ history. Or simply the murderer of the Templar Order, plunging the knife in its back while it’s already racked by its death throes? I bet you don’t even know the difference anymore. I wonder which one you'd actually prefer.”

_Lavellan-_ “How do you know who I am?” Asha asked, voice carrying across the cold air.

The demon laughed, and then covered his mouth, looking a little apologetic. “I’m sorry, Ashatarsylnin. If you only knew how amusing that question is to me.” He raised his hands, to encompass the Keep’s empty shell, “when you are the whole reason I am here!”

“...What?”

“Come closer, little girl. Shouting hurts this body’s throat.”

Asha cast a wary glance at Cullen, who was tense, and probably not a huge fan of her conversing with demons in possessed mage bodies. His grip kept tightening and flexing on the hilt of his sword, as if he needed to reassure himself he still had a hold of it.

But she was the Inquisitor, and he silently looked over at her, waiting on her decision. She nodded at him, then took some hesitant steps towards the demon. Frost and the twice frozen remnants of snow crackled under Asha’s boots, the only sound as she inched forward.

“Explain yourself.” she demanded.

“In time, in time…” he smiled again, the expression taut and fake and alien, “But I’m sorry. I have to ask. Do you like it?”

“Like… what?”

“The garden I made for you.”

Asha froze in place.

Imshael continued, scratching his nose and surveying the scene as if he didn’t notice her lock up. “I have to confess, I think it’s some of my best work.”

“I - I don’t understand.”

“I know, it’s a gauche question, to ask how someone likes their gift. I should play hard to get, I suppose! But you see, it’s normally so rare for someone to be yet living to critique my craft. How can I _not_ ask for your opinion?”

“How can this be… ‘my gift’?” Asha said, “I’ve never met you before.”

“Then, do the fragments of templar corpses that litter the floors like rose petals not please you?”

Asha opened her mouth, and found she couldn’t lie. She settled instead for: “Your evasion _does not please me_.”

“Yet you do not answer my questions either. I wish you would. It’s hardly like I can ask Thelhen. It would hopefully please him to know that I continue his actions even after I was no longer bound by oath, in such lovely and delicious ways. Maybe I ask because I see resemblance between you - cousins, I believe?”

_Thelhen…_ That was the Keeper of Clan Virnehn. Keepers and Firsts did not need to bear any relation, as the position wasn’t inherited by blood. But the two of them were in fact distantly related, and possibly got their magic from the same Ancestor. Her great-grandmother’s sister had left and married into Virnehn long before Asha was born. 

“You did this for Thelhen? Thelhen… asked for this?”

“A little. Not _thissss,_ specifically. The choice he made was the seed of it. I… embellished. Cultivated, if you will.”

“Thelhen is dead. All of Clan Virnehn is dead.” Ellana had explained to Asha the changes that had taken place when she was gone from the world - Virnehn’s disappearance in the Orlesian Civil War was one of the losses that had led to her sister joining Keeper Hawen in the Exalted Plains. She didn’t know how deals with demons worked, but she was pretty certain that no yoke outlasted the mage who cast it.

“Well, if you want to repay his vengeance for your loss and have me avenge him in turn, I’d be happy to oblige. You only need to make the deal...”

Cold dread began to seep into Asha’s chest, as awful comprehension started to overtake her. “ _Explain yourself_.”

He laughed again, the way one might at a child holding a particularly dramatic tantrum. “My, but I am so happy to see you, Ashatarsylnin. It’s so rare that one gets to pinpoint the precise reason for their new path in life, never mind meet them to thank them in person. The Clan Lavellan massacre… the anniversary is just weeks away, is it not?”

When she flinched, he smiled, “I know the date well, for it was three days later that I was summoned by the blood of your distant clansman, who swore me into his service to make the _shemlen_ pay.”

“W-what?”

“The funny thing is, I suppose he could’ve asked me simply to find you. I gave him that choice but… it didn’t cross his mind to think you were alive. Did he really think the templars wouldn’t keep you alive?”

Asha didn’t answer.

“I always knew it was _just_ the templars, of course,” Imshael continued. “You don’t go around tasting desires without getting a whiff of dominance and the hunger for tranquility off most of them. They all have that urge, even if they choose not to act on it. Even if it’s just a morbid curiosity, lying there in the back of their mind untouched. They all wonder what it would be like to hold that much power over another person - the Chantry has told them it is their right, after all. But Thelhen was convinced you were a casualty in some age old crime, as old as the Evanuris themselves. And he was wonderfully _inspecific_ in his wording.”

And now Clan Virnehn was wiped out, laid waste by the War of the Lions... _This monster was bound to Virnehn and somehow it killed them_. Asha was shaking.

“And then all that was over. Michel was on his warpath, I was free, and Samson came to me. Well, maybe I was feeling sentimental, but I couldn’t help but think… Thelhen was dead, but _you_ were the reason I was truly brought here. You! Ashatarsylnin! Samson was the one who asked me to cultivate the lyrium, but all this work… this was for you! You’ve been haunting these monsters’ dreams for months now! It’s been _delightful_. I knew your face before I even saw you in the village - you practically stalked these halls! And when they heard how you’d carved your way through the Winter Palace… My goodness, it’s what some of my peers merely dream of, to be the nightmare that plagues even monsters’ waking thoughts.”

Her hands were slick with sweat through her gloves.

“I call myself the Gardener. This is _your garden_. Do you think it pretty? Does it please you? Surely it must be fate, that we meet here, now. I was brought here by your clansman to avenge _your_ death, and you come find me, after my masterpiece is complete -”

“...Masterpiece…?”

“What else can I call it? I didn’t even need to hurt them. They poured poison into their cups then asked me simply to serve it. Efficient, wouldn’t you say? Your own hand could not have sculpted a better revenge.”

“That’s - they - all of these red templars have _killed people_.” It was all she could think to say, through a mouth that felt numb.

“Yes. Well. It’s an imperfect sum.” Imshael shrugged. “I had to let some of them out into the world, or Samson would get suspicious. The survival rate of my project isn’t that high, even if it’s the highest in Thedas, and I hear you’ve been doing more than your fair share of thinning their numbers. Feeding that fire. I do wish you had gotten here a little earlier. They grew so prettily, and it was such fun to prune them. You would’ve been a useful assistant. ”

It was becoming difficult to breathe. 

Imshael smiled at her. “Come on, Ashatarsylnin,” sickness roiled through her at the use of her name, that only worsened when the demon’s eyes flickered over, deliberately, to Cullen, “I know you might need to be a little… tactful, in present company, but I’ve given you such a pretty present. If you don’t thank me soon, I might be offended.”

“Stop-” her voice was hoarse.

He grinned, “ok, ok. Here’s my first deal with you, even though I have already given you so much for free. I’ll stop... if you can tell me, right now, that you didn’t want them all dead.”

“I-”

“Not Erasmus? Not Connal nor Hayden? Not… Reagan? Silas? ...Paxley?”

A sharp intake of breath, but this was not from Asha. She felt like she was in a nightmare as she heard Cullen say, “...Paxley?”

His voice held recognition.

This time, there was the taste and burn of bile in the back of her throat.

“I know all their names, Ashatarsylnin,” Imshael continued, as if Cullen hadn’t spoken. Of course, the demon didn’t need to acknowledge it. By this point it had gotten exactly what it wanted - that is, a place under their skin, in a way that would take an indeterminate amount of time to prize out and scrub clean. “I learned them all, as they screamed and died. I remembered them for you. _I know you._ Better than anyone here. _Are you really not going to thank me?_ ”

Asha felt like she was almost floating as she took another few steps forward, drew her spirit blade down to her side. She could now make out the feathers on the shoulders of his robes, the scars on his hands, and the thin threads of dark, greyish-black veins around his eyes.

“This isn’t going to end in bloodshed, Ashatarsylnin,” Imshael said, his voice dropping to a caress. He watched her sword-hand like amused him, “you can’t kill me. What crimes have I even committed?”

“You killed… all these people…” That was Cole, and Asha couldn’t work out if he was speaking for her, or for himself. She was actually pretty sure he wasn’t reading her emotions, because she couldn’t quite convince herself she had any.

“The Inquisitor doesn’t mind, does she? This wasn’t murder, this was _justice_.” Imshael smiled thinly. “I could do so much more for you. Think of what your people suffered. This wasn’t all of them. Some of them are still-”

Asha thought that, of the people and monsters who were startled by the sudden moment when her blade pierced through the back of the demon’s skull, she was the most surprised of all.

The camp was quiet, and Asha hadn’t seen Cullen in hours. He was clearly avoiding her - but to be fair, she hadn’t exactly left her tent to go find him, either.

She wondered if he’d thought, for a second, that she might make the deal. Become a blood mage, and thrive on templar suffering for the rest of her days. Which probably wouldn’t have been very many, because she assumed that even if Cullen hadn’t been able to stomach cutting her down, Bull would still make that call.

Was this really the end of her story? Clan Lavellan was gone, _still_ , and there would be no closure. Just a trail of bodies that led her here, with nowhere to go when they ran out.

Nothing - not the body of Imshael lying prone in front of her, or the capturing of Suledin Keep, or even the ice cold bath she’d forced herself into, so frigid it caused her vision to white for a second - could seem to break through the tired shock of the day. The revelations that… what? A plea from her people had inadvertently caused the Red Templars? That she’d gotten her revenge for Clan Lavellan through a demon, without ever having to forge a pact? That all the people who’d hurt her were dead, but she’d never even see their bodies, and they'd never had to face the consequences of the massacre when reflected in her eyes?

That she wouldn’t take a demon’s offer, but only when Cullen was watching?

_No. I would’ve still made that decision._

Even with three layers of clothing, two blankets and a bedroll keeping the chill of Emprise du Lion at bay, Asha felt a slick, terrible shudder bleed its way down her spine. She was sat upright, staring at the anchor light casting a glow across the canvas in the winter darkness. Where was Cullen? Working late? Sleeping elsewhere? It was dark, but it was winter - she couldn’t be sure of the time.

_He probably can’t even look at you_ , she thought glumly.

He was definitely avoiding her. 

She was still staring in the vortex of emerald patterns on the tent canvas when she heard it - a gasp, then a grunt, then what seemed to a stack of papers falling. It was quiet, but recognisable: probably the logistics tent, two down from where she currently sat. Asha was brought back to herself, and immediately clambered out of the bedroll. Her breath fogged on the air like smoke as she stuffed her feet haphazard and bare into boots, and ran over to the mouth of the tent, in time to hear another gasping breath.

She wasn’t sure what she expected - it hadn’t quite sounded like an attack. But still, there was something quite surprising about finding Cullen asleep face down at the desk, his brow furrowed. The papers she’d heard slide of the table were in a crumpled pile on the frozen dirt. The only thing left on the desk was a rectangular wooden box, and as if on cue, his arm flailed slightly and he muttered something, still asleep. He knocked it, but it did not quite fall off the desk’s surface. It seemed he was having some kind of nightmare. He was lucky he hadn’t hit the oil lamp that had not yet fully burned down.

“Cullen!” she hissed, darting in and shaking his shoulder. A quick glance around told her the rest of the camp was empty, but still - this seemed private. She ran a hand across his cheek, finding it ice cold, then shook him again. “Cullen! _Vhenan’ara_.”

He jolted awake, eyes snapping open, and before the next breath his hand had encircled her wrist. She flinched at the pressure, hard enough to bruise. And it might have done so, had the disorientation not immediately left his eyes at her show of pain. He saw her, and sat up straight, dropping his hold. She saw the moment when reality slotted back into place, and he recalled everything they’d witnessed together that day.

“You were having a nightmare, I think,” she said, gently. She wondered if it had been a while since he’d had one. There had been a couple of nights of them sleeping together when she’d woken up to find him tense and incredibly awake beside her, but nothing that ever made him flail and cry out. 

He ran a hand across his face, looked down at the desk, the box, and the mess of papers, and grimaced.

“Understandable, really,” she said, “given the day we had. If I’d realised it was late, I would’ve… You didn’t come to bed.”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d want me there,” he muttered. Then winced, as if he hadn’t meant to say it aloud. He quickly scraped the chair back and began gathering the fallen papers, clearly just wanting something to do.

“Oh,” Asha said intelligently, watching his back as he worked. There was an instinctive ripple of hurt, before the hypocrisy hit her. She’d thought he was avoiding her because of what Imshael had said - about her wanting those deaths to happen. And he had been avoiding her, but because…

“I thought you might not want to be around me either,” she admitted. 

“ _Why?_ ”

“Because - I mean - it’s my fault. If what that demon said is true… the Red Templars…”

“ _‘Your fault’_? For what, being attacked in your own home?” he let out a heavy breath, “of all the things to take from that awful conversation, why would I-”

“I almost… Mages did this. Thelhen was a mage - he was a Keeper, like me. That he would do something so irresponsible… and in my name, as well. I didn’t know if you - and I mean - I still can’t feel sorry that it happened, I can’t feel _anything_ -”

Asha felt tears burn behind her eyes. They weren’t ones she was planning to let fall, but before she knew what was happening, she found herself enveloped in a hug. The situation had gone from her waking Cullen up from a night terror, to him comforting her, without her realising.

She flinched. Cullen immediately began to withdraw, looking guilty, but she sighed, and tugged him back in again, “don’t be an ass - it’s not anything like _that_. You’re just fucking freezing.”

“My apologies,” he murmured, then stroked a hand through her hair. She wrapped her arms around him, wondering if he wouldn’t genuinely died from exposure if he’d insisted on playing the martyr and avoiding her all night, by unspoken agreement.

“I thought you might want some space,” he said after some time had passed. “After today.”

“Because you thought I didn’t want to see you?”

“For so many reasons. You faced off against so many people who hurt you. And what that monster said… about templars. I - I knew Paxley. Knew _of_ him, anyway. He was someone in Kirkwall, I _spoke_ with him-”

Asha couldn’t fight a shudder, but buried her face further into Cullen’s shoulder so he wouldn’t think it was because of him. “We already knew that they were from Kirkwall.”

“There’s a difference between knowing hypothetically, and having it confirmed. I _knew_ him. How you can stand to be around me…”

“Cullen. We did enough of this. In the beginning. At least, I thought we did. What happens between us… it’s separate from what we saw today. We’ve both changed enough for that to be true. I mean, you just saw me get my first blood mage offer, and you didn’t go full Silence on me, or anything…”

“I knew you’d never agree to it.”

“Did you? That’s more than I can say for myself.”

Cullen let out a huff, but Asha was surprised that, in this situation, it actually sounded amused. “Please. You’d never be comfortable if you let something or someone else do all the work for you.”

Asha smiled despite herself. Of all the objections to blood magic, it seemed like quite a strange one… especially from a templar.

“Is it bad that I feel almost… cheated? Like he stole my kills.” she wondered if that was a stupid or tactless thing to say, given that the ‘kills’ in question were Cullen’s once-colleagues.

There was a sigh, as she felt his chest move under her cheek. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Sorry, if this is difficult, I know you-”

“-No. Let me speak,” Cullen said. “I understand what you mean. We always want to see justice done for the crimes against us, and there will always be a part of us that longs for it to be dealt by our own hand. It gives you back the safety and agency that was robbed from you, when the act was first done. It’s why I… I found it difficult to hate demons I knew deep-down I was too weak to defeat, that I’d watched another person kill in front of me when I’d made my decision that all hope was lost. I had training, _against_ demons - Rose Amell didn’t. And still she was able to succeed where I failed. You have all that fear, and rage, and powerlessness… when it doesn’t have a destination, it just spills out over everything you have. I’m a testament to that.”

“It’s just- I’d love to say that I hated what happened today because there was so much needless suffering. To feel something… anything… even just for the loss of Clan Virnehn. But I… I don’t really care. I just wish I’d had a hand in it. It would be nice to have been able to ask… why.”

“I know.”

“We never even knew this was happening! All this unfolded without us, for months.”

“I know.”

She could tell he was trying inadequately to comfort her, but mostly he sounded wretched. “...Are you ok?”

Another sigh, “...not really.”

“I’m sorry,” Asha said, and was proud to mean it, in the most selfish sense that she regretted he was hurting, even if she regretted none of the things that had happened to make him feel that way. “You shouldn’t hide it from me, ok? Well, unless you want to, although that seems unhealthy. But… don’t do it because you think I want to hide from you as well. I’m not afraid of you.”

“Aren’t you? You heard what that demon said.”

“I heard _all_ of what that demon said. Most of it was about me.”

“No. You must know which bit I mean.”

Asha looked up at him, confused.

“...That all templars want tranquility, a little.”

She stepped back a bit, to look at his pain-stricken face, that became more pained at even that new margin of distance between them. Again, he felt guilt for something before she felt anything at all.

“...Cullen, do you want me tranquil?”

“Of course not!”

“Would you ever make someone tranquil?”

“No! Maker, no! But… but I would've done, once? I must've done. I didn’t ever want to see mages tranquil, specifically. But I know I liked being able to subdue them. That was why I was a mage hunter. It made me feel powerful again. And how is that any different?” 

There was a little instinctive dread at his words, but then Asha thought about the bloody swathe - well, not bloody, that was rather the point, everyone was crystal now - she’d cut through the Keep that very morning, and in the quarry the day before. Just because her kills were currently being sanctioned by the Inquisition's agenda, didn’t mean she wouldn’t be doing the exact same thing if she could, in another world where there wasn’t a free-for-all on templars because they’d left the nest and conveniently decided to go full evil first.

“Cullen, I love you, but don’t be such an idiot,” she huffed. She held him by shoulders, fingers gripping in while she fought the urge to shake him. “Tranquility is fucking evil, don’t get me wrong. I don’t know how anyone can kid themselves it isn’t. And yeah, you never questioned it, which sucks. But you didn’t invent it. You didn’t abuse it. You think you’re the first person to ever entertain dark thoughts? If we were judging people by what they want or _wanted_ to do in the past, I wouldn’t pass either. And all told, if we were going by my darkest thoughts in my darkest times, you would’ve probably been dead in Haven.” 

When he looked at her, a little stunned, she said, “ok, not my most romantic speech ever, I know. But that’s not the point. Think of it this way - what the fuck do you think a Harrowing is? Why did you lot place any fucking trust in them? You think every mage who leaves a Harrowing is completely clear? Just sold on the Chantry and thinking, ‘you know what, I was absolutely in no way tempted to take up absolute power, and in fact that sexy, sexy demon had nothing to offer me’? Of course not! Probably every mage that goes into the Fade sees the allure of it. It wouldn’t be a test, otherwise. Not that isn’t fucked in its own way - not sure templars have to have any kind of test of their intentions before they get to swing a sword and chug down some lyrium...”

She sighed, “Imshael talked a lot of shit, but his bullshit about the difference between desires and choices is right. It’s not about being completely infallible in your intentions or your thoughts - that’s nearly impossible. Not many people are like that. _I’m_ not like that. It’s about making the right choices when it matters. And then you keep making them, until good choices become good intentions and you become a better person. And you are a _better person_. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”

He was still silent, staring at her wide eyed. Asha wondered why he wasn’t speaking - was he unconvinced? 

“Look, the only reason I stayed away from you today, other than everything being just generally awful, was because I thought you were avoiding me after seeing me go nearly full blood mage. But clearly, both of us were being idiots, and were both thinking that the other person must secretly hate us. If you trust me enough for blood magic to not even cross your mind, and I trusted you enough for tranquility to not cross _my_ mind, then-”

“-You just said you love me.”

Asha faltered mid-rant, her sentence trailing off. “W-what?”

“A minute ago. You just said, ‘Cullen, I love you, but don’t be such an idiot’,” he said, carefully, sounding out the words. “I confess, I probably would’ve just assumed I misheard you. But you also insulted me, and that’s pretty in-character.”

“...Oh.”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Love me. Asha.” His lip quirked a little, pulling on the edges of his scar, and Asha quickly looked away before she did anything inappropriate, like pounce him. There was a little frustration that leaked into his voice then, but it still sounded overwhelmingly affectionate.

“Oh,” she said, again, wondering where all her intelligent and salient points about them no longer acting afraid of each other had disappeared off to now she couldn’t string more than three words together, “well, yeah. I do. Love you, I mean.”

“Oh.” he replied in an echo, and she frankly took that as a victory.

“Sorry, I should’ve probably articulated it better. And maybe not said it while I was shouting at you.”

“You weren’t shouting at me.”

“Still…”

She was still holding his shoulders like she wanted to shake him. She hastily dropped her death grip, wishing she’d just said it by the lake, when everything was softer and they weren’t both feeling wretched. 

He reached down to the hands that now hung limp by her sides, and threaded their fingers together. “I love you, too.” he cleared his throat, “have done for a while, actually.”

She couldn’t fight a grin as she looked back up at him “Yeah, I kind of figured,” she said, her tone falsely dismissive even as her heart sang, “didn’t think Ser Cullen Rutherford the Uptight would skinny dip for _just anyone_ -”

“Maker’s breath. You are _fucking insufferable,_ ” he muttered, and then he tugged her in towards him and kissed her. His face was still freezing cold, and his mouth a little sour from sleep, but neither of those things mattered as all the horrible shadows still clinging to her from the day’s events began to melt away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the extreme sad bastard hours, but what can I say? I'm a marshmallow-soft bitch who likes seeing broken people actively try and work towards being better through their relationships with each other.
> 
> I'm really excited to start on this final act with you guys, bc I've got some juicy canon-divergent stuff in the works. This entire act is plot heavy rather than romance heavy, but I hope to make it up to you all by delivering some interesting original content!
> 
> Author's note: All information used for plot-relevant tweaks to Imshael are based on his backstory from _The Masked Empire_ , where he does ally with a Dalish clan 'for reasons', etc. etc. I thought I'd have more fun with that as I begin to play out Asha's tranquility plotline and resolve it :)


	78. Chapter Seventy-Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the trail of Samson.

There was salt on the air as they disembarked from the boat that had carried them to northern Orlais. Within Emprise du Lion liberated, Asha and Cullen had taken one look at the documents they’d amassed from picking the Keep clean, and both known their next step. The winter would only last so long, and soon the Red Templar army would make a move on the Arbor Wilds. They had to get to the Shrine of Dumat, to Maddox, and have some chance at an advantage over Samson before then.

Asha glanced over at Cullen as he handed her the reins of her mount. She smiled at him, in a way that seemed to him a little forced. They were both tense, and nervous, about what they would find at the end of this journey. When they had readied to move out of Sahrnia, he’d been able to tell that she was on the verge of sending him back to Skyhold. But she’d never said it. Even though it was unpleasant and uncomfortable, and revealing parts of themselves they didn’t want the other person to see or perhaps didn’t want to admit to themselves were there, this journey had now, somehow, become something they had to embark on together.

Would he have preferred it if he could go back to his tower in Skyhold, to worry over her wellbeing but at least hide from whatever ugly truths awaited both of them at Dumat? Would distance have smoothed out every rough edge of their pasts, that seemed destined to snare and catch on the other and cause them pain? 

No. Cullen knew for a fact that was the coward's choice. His past was uglier than hers, and he had no right to hide it from her.

Part of him still couldn’t believe she still wanted him, despite everything.

The morning after she’d told him she loved him, they’d laid in their tent, skin to skin. Asha had trailed a gentle finger across his face, his brow, along his jaw, down his neck to skim along his shoulder. She'd pressed a kiss to his collarbone. Placed a palm flat against his chest, to hear exactly what she was doing to his heart.

“ _Vhenan’ara_ ,” she’d said, out of the blue - which was a little disquieting, given Cullen had considered himself quite beyond speech. She broke her lips away from him and looked up, bright sea glass eyes warm and full of love, “I never told you what it means.”

“ _Vhenan_ is… heart?” he offered, intelligently.

“Mhmmm,” she said, pleased, as she snuggled in closer to his chest.. She kissed the underside of his jaw, like it was a prize… and it was. He stroked across her shoulder, careful to avoid her spine. “But _vhenan’ara_... it’s something different. I guess you’d translate it as ‘heart’s desire’, but that’s actually not quite accurate.”

“So what does it mean?" he cleared his throat, "Accurately?”

“‘Heart’s journey’.” she replied, with a small smile, “I didn’t think much about it when I picked it, but now I understand why.” She pressed another kiss, to his neck, then to his cheek, while he tried valiantly to stay focused on the conversation. She placed a hand against his cheek and directed his face so that their eyes locked. “I don’t think either of us are quite where we want to be, my love. But I know that we’re travelling in the right direction, and that my destination lies somewhere with you. And even if I didn’t already love you -” she grinned, a little goofily, “which I totally do, by the way - I know I’m going to love the man you become even more.”

There was a silence, in which Cullen found himself genuinely wondering if he was dreaming. A year ago, this would’ve all seemed impossible.

He thought about the rectangular wooden box that he’d taken from one of the templars amongst the Inquisition forces currently stationed at Sahrnia, that Asha hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t opened it the night before, and now, he wanted to make sure he never did in the future.

“Well,” he said, finally. “I suppose I finally got my romantic speech. And it only took you two attempts...”

“Oh, you utter ass!” she shrieked, before tumbling him flat onto his back and silencing him completely.

“I hope you two crazy kids enjoyed your time with actual walls,” Dorian's quip brought Cullen back to the present. The mage was looking a little grey around the edges from the overnight passage on the boat, as he too led his horse across the docks. “Because if I have to hear any more tawdry sounds coming from behind tent canvas…”

Asha opened her mouth to retort, but Cullen got there quicker than she did. “Is that a request for a moratorium on all fraternisation, then? Until we reach our goal?” he asked, blandly. “As Commander, I can see the benefits issuing the order would have for productivity, but it would of course effect _all_ couplings within our party, for the foreseeable future. In the spirit of fairness.”

He cast a meaningful look over at the Iron Bull, who was paying some dockworker for something that was probably not completely above board. His head, shoulders, and horns all towered above the other heads in the crowd.

“You’ve made him _sassy_ ,” Dorian observed to Asha, while she simply grinned. “However did you manage it?”

“He’s always been sassy,” she replied, off-hand, “it’s just that he’s way more polite about it than we are.”

“Oh, to be a strapping young templar!” Dorian cried out theatrically, turning the heads of a couple of dockhands, “ready and physically capable of anything - and everything - his mistress-in-Command requests! No doubt raring to go at any given moment!”

“Oh, to be a stripling mage!” Asha deadpanned, at the same volume, “always eager for - and frankly incapable of preventing! - his being thrown down and ravaged by his chunk of a beau! At _any given moment._ ”

Cullen snorted, and she gave him a wink. Bull had been walking back from the guard, and her voice had been pitched so he was in earshot. He play-acted a leer with barely a moment needed for improvisation. “You having dirty thoughts about me, Boss?” 

Asha smiled at the qunari and patted his arm, while Dorian blushed and failed to sputter a retort. “Always, Bull. Always.”

“Looks like you’ve got some competition, Commander,” Bull said, with his own wink.

Cullen decided to ignore the both of them, leaned forward, and kissed Asha on the cheek. “I’m not worried.”

“So, was Maddox a templar as well?” 

It was dark. Asha looked at Cullen from where she was using the light of the anchor to check over their latest Inquisition correspondence. Both of them were up late, working to try and understand exactly what was going on in Skyhold in their absence, and what Leliana's scouts thought they faced ahead. But they no longer had a logistics tent, and Orlais was still fucking freezing, so the two of them just worked side by side hunched up in their bedrolls. Which was less romantic and profoundly less fun than anything she’d rather be doing in them. She could not believe she had become one of _those people_.

Leliana had sent a raven confirming that the Shrine of Dumat - mentioned in passing in a couple of the Emprise du Lion journals - was indeed a place that had seen numerous shipments of high level enchantment materials over the last few months, including copious supplies of red lyrium. Solas had also sent some terse updates on preparations for the Arbor Wilds, and the bastard had written them entirely in elvhen. Not in elvhen script - then Asha wouldn’t have been able to read them either, and his intended slight would’ve been rendered ineffectual - but elvhen as translated through common runes. She’d had to translate the letters aloud so that Cullen could input on her reply regarding strategy. 

It seemed Solas was still pissed, and being petty about it. 

Cullen froze up next to her. “...No.” he said, quietly, dropping his own set of papers into his lap. “Bollocks… did I not tell you?”

Asha shrugged. The information Cullen had found on Maddox that he felt constituted a lead had all taken place while she was still processing the revelations Imshael had served up to her. He’d been handling the requisition of Suledin Keep while she had… well. Been hunting dragons across the bridge, with Bull. To... process. 

“I read your notes, but they were mostly about the red lyrium armour and what Leliana should be looking for,” she said, “I obviously know he’s an enchanter. And you knew him in Kirkwall, so...”

In truth, the real reason she was asking was because she wondered if Maddox was the arcanist who had crafted her tranquil brand. 

“Maddox isn’t a templar,” Cullen told her, gently, “he’s… well. He’s tranquil.”

Asha blinked, as all her predictions were colossally overturned. “...Excuse me?”

“Maddox was a mage in Kirkwall’s circle. Samson smuggled letters between him and his sweetheart. It was actually the reason he was kicked out of the Order.”

“ _That_ was why he was kicked out?” Asha asked, incredulously, dropping her own papers. “I thought the man was an _addict_.”

“Well, he was - he _is_. But addiction was rather the consequence of…”

“...Having being cut off from his supply,” she finished for him, then made a disgusted noise that would’ve made Cassandra proud. “Kirkwall was so fucked up. _The Order_ is so fucked up.”

“Yes, stamping out disobedience becomes pretty simple when your punishment makes the penitent ever more reliant on your authority,” Cullen replied, with a grim expression. 

“Is that why you’re-” she trailed off. Neither of them had discussed his lyrium withdrawal for a while, and she gathered that he actually preferred if it went unspoken - probably because that way, it didn’t drag it back into his awareness. 

Cullen looked at her, knowing what she was getting at. “In part. It’s about _choice_ ,” he said. “If everyone is bound to the Order with no chance of escaping it, it's always going to be a recipe for disaster. Not just for the kind of resentment it cultivates, but for the kind of people it attracts. When I was at my worst, I should not have been in the field... but I was. What else could I actually do? I was reliant on them for my supply, and I needed to work to earn it. Hopefully, if I succeed in my endeavour, we can replicate it with others, and then the only people who need to be in the Order are those who want to be there, and who rightly serve a cause.”

_Or, we could just abolish the Order altogether._ It was far too late in the day for that kind of conversation - and besides, Cullen and his idealism didn’t actually speak for the templars, who were currently all tapping red lyrium somewhere in the Arbor Wilds, or apparently in the Shrine of Dumat. 

Instead she asked, “Samson couldn’t have done this himself? Given up lyrium?”

Cullen sighed. “Unfortunately, Samson didn’t really get a choice, either. I don’t hold myself up as a paragon of self-restraint, but I cut _myself_ off. I have my reasons for doing this,” he glanced over at her, “I’m reminded of them every day. Samson was thrown out and that meant he was, what? Just supposed to let himself die? He likely had access to lyrium smugglers. His addiction might not even be his fault - the stuff smugglers peddle is _not_ pure. It’s not that I don’t understand Samson’s resentment-”

“- But you didn’t go full red lyrium commander about it,” Asha finished for him. “And this guy, Maddox. He got made tranquil, for a few love letters?” 

“The official charge was ‘corrupting the moral integrity of a templar’, I believe,” Cullen muttered.

“Oh, gods forbid!” Asha exclaimed. She clenched her fist, and the anchor sparked. “I bet they polished that flawless ‘moral integrity’ with a fresh dose of lyrium every morning!”

“I don’t know if Meredith was appeasing hardliners within the organisation, or if she was doing it to further punish Samson, or if she just did it for her own pleasure,” Cullen looked bitterly guilty, “all I know is, it was before her sword. And I was… rather checked out, at the time. It certainly wasn’t about Maddox’s crimes themselves, but what they represented.”

“And now he’s… what? Imprisoned by Samson? Under his control? Does the man hate him because it was getting caught that resulted in his addiction? But… he’s already tranquil!”

“I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t think it’s anything like that,” Cullen admitted. “I think Samson… may have rescued him.”

Asha froze, knowing her face must look horrified and confused… as she thought back to all of the past months, searching for tranquils and finding only skulls. When even the rebel mages had been neglecting and sacrificing tranquil, how was she supposed to imagine a templar caring about their survival?

“When the mages rebelled, it was the Gallows that suffered most,” Cullen told her. He looked down at her hand, like he was considering taking it, froze in hesitation, then actually reached out and interlocked their fingers. She didn’t pull away. “Meredith invoked the rite of annulment, Orsino became an abomination as a last resort… Maddox was listed amongst the bodies that were never found. I assumed he must’ve died in the fighting. At best I’d assumed he’d escaped, somehow, and was surviving off the kindness of others-”

“Tranquil don’t find kindness,” Asha said through numb lips, thinking of all the brief memories she had of what had taken place in the months between Clan Lavellan, and the mages finding her.

“No, and it was always in rather short supply in Kirkwall, even at the best of times,” Cullen replied. “Hawke had a monopoly on the generosity of strangers, both giving and receiving. There wasn’t any left for the rest of us.”

“But-”

“-Samson must’ve found him. Taken him in. They were friends, once," Cullen ran a hand down his face. "I don’t pretend for a second that there wouldn’t have been ulterior motives. Maddox was always a talented enchanter-”

“-And now he’s entirely obedient.”

“Yes. He likely made and maintains whatever armour the man is wearing entirely by himself, he's more than talented…” Cullen frowned. “I don’t think Samson ever resented Maddox for what the Order did to him. Not when Maddox suffered a far worse fate. But he would also be shrewd enough to recognise an extraordinary resource, and having an artificer of Maddox’s calibre as a personal armourer...”

“Can we save him?” Asha blurted. “Maddox. If we find him?" S

he heard her voice become high pitched, and a little frantic, "Maybe we can try the tranquil cure! Get him back to Skyhold with us, and have Solas summon a spirit! We'd finally get to see if the Seekers’ method works…”

“Yes. Absolutely,” Cullen said with no hesitation, squeezing her hand. He gave her a small smile, though it was tight and drawn, “...It would nice, to right at least one wrong that came out of Kirkwall. Maddox didn’t deserve that fate. Maker knows I didn’t do enough at the time. And Samson... he needs to be stopped.”

Asha gave him a taut smile, but her stomach roiled with uncertainty. She supposed that it would be the neatest kind of justice: to rupture whatever protection Samson had from the fate he’d visited upon countless others, and watch the red lyrium take him. Yet she didn't actually... know him. He was just a faceless enemy, at the head of an army filled with her worst nightmares. She couldn't summon anger from the thought of him, only wariness and fear that she would fail to stop his plans. How was she supposed to equate all that with the fact that the man Cullen described might be the only person who cared enough to keep a tranquil mage alive, when even her own people hadn’t had the thought to do so? 

...Did she actually care that he’d destroyed the templar order in the first place? 

Well, one was a complicated question. She certainly cared about the fact that those Red Templars had ravaged huge parts of the country.

_Saving Maddox, though._ She felt a small spark of hope in her chest. That was a goal to latch onto, alleviating some of the guilt she consistently felt at being the only mage alive to have survived and revoked tranquility. 

That would make this feel worthwhile. That would make this feel right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooft, sorry for a hit in the feels at the end of a fluff chapter, I told you the final act was an angsty one!
> 
> The 'vhenan'ara' thing meaning 'heart's journey' is a gloss from Project Elvhen. I thought it was cute <3


	79. Chapter Seventy-Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before the Dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: violence, body horror, minor character death

The Shrine of Dumat was, predictably, filled to the brim with red lyrium. 

“Samson’s sense of interior design is really rather one note, isn’t it?” Dorian remarked, as they entered the transept. A thick vein of scarlet crystal emerged from the balcony opposite like a flower, or maddening crown.

“Daggers under the skin,” Cole intoned, gazing up at it. “It eats you inside until you're nothing. They hear a different song. The song behind the door old whispers want opened. They are dead and dark and done.”

Asha could feel it again: that feverish heat associated with sickness, coming off the crystals in waves. The air felt heavy to breathe in, the same way it would if you were on a corpse-rotten battlefield. But there was nothing here. The halls were empty. Just the gunpowder edge of explosives and the iron tang of blood.

“Does it feel warm in here, to you?” she whispered to Dorian.

The other mage cast her a surprised look. “I felt the heat off of the crystals in Sahrnia, but that was only when everything else was bollocks-shrinking _frigid_. Nothing now. Not in here.”

She nodded uneasily, brushing her hair back from her face. Her skin was dry to the touch, though she swore she felt clammy with sweat. Fucking marvellous.

She was almost relieved when the Red Templars attacked.

Asha threw down a set of fire mines to block their approach, and as she did, she felt the power to do so leave her in a rush, like a jacket lined with lead had suddenly been lifted from her shoulders. The power left her in one heady deluge, then it immediately replenished. Like losing a limb, but seconds later watching it grow back. Asha spent a moment briefly confused, before hastily barriering everyone when she noticed archers slamming out of the doors ahead and claiming the higher ground. The magical sheen coated everyone so strongly that from the corner of her eye they looked limned in silver. Again, her magic was back within seconds.

Then, the first templar hit her fire mines, and he exploded.

There was no other way to describe it. One limb went in a different direction to the rest. Shards of crystal embedded itself in the wall next to him. Some of the chunks of crystal caught alight and smouldered.

Everyone paused in the room. Dorian glanced at her, impressed. Asha felt a flare of magic inside her, and suddenly she was charging forward, buoyed on a wave of certainty. She had already won this fight.

She flung a static cage up behind the archers. Two of them dropped. The third screamed in pain. Valour flared up from its hilt and the templar in front of her only managed to parry it at the last second. It scoured a dark line through solid rock as the rebuff directed the blade’s tip towards the floor. Then, Bull’s axe embedded itself in the templar’s torso, and they splintered with the crackle smash of glass.

Asha moved to the next person. She saw the shadow’s spiked arm aim at her head, feinted to the side, then sheared the arm clear off as it extended. Valour’s cut left a smouldering trail, the edges of the wound glowing like the embers of a dying fire.

She looked down at her blade. It didn’t seem any different than usual. Same white light. Same ringing tone through the air. Glowing brighter with each cut, otherwise unchanged. But still her magic was churning within her, like a dam steadily flooding with water rather than a river that flowed into and through her, out into the world. She swore she could -

“Asha!” came a terse shout, and suddenly Cullen’s arm was around her, his shield up and angled above her head. It rang out with a resounding clang as a behemoth’s arm - when had a behemoth got there? - crashed down upon the two of them. Cullen grunted in pain as his arm tightened around her waist reflexively, but his strength held fast. His shield directed the behemoth’s clubbed fist away and caused the lumbering beast to overbalance, as he used the rest of his momentum to spin Asha around and out from the crush of melee. 

But... that wouldn’t do. He’d just been hit by a _behemoth_. As Asha began to be manoeuvred out from harm’s way, her foot stomped the ground. She felt the breath leave her body in a puff of fogged air as under her feet - and subsequently the behemoth’s - ice mines appeared. No hand gestures or staff patterns needed. They were just summoned. The ground glazed over like glass, and then the behemoth’s leg locked up with frost. It pantomimed confusion, looked down to try and tug its leg away…  
And it snapped off.

The behemoth - and Cullen, actually - looked down in comical bemusement at the now free-standing leg, frozen solid and upright. Taking advantage of the momentary distraction, Asha darted out and around the Commander’s shield arm. 

_Where was this power coming from?_

_Who cares?_ came a much smaller voice from somewhere else in her head. But somehow that voice was actually her own, and it was on that realisation that the tidal wave of magic burst forth. Her blade lanced up and through the behemoth’s jaw, and his head began to just… crumble. Maybe she’d just got the angle right. Maybe the monster’s head was sloppily and poorly formed. The spirit blade went through like butter, and in response, her barrier burned brighter. She felt… unstoppable.

“Nice shield arm,” she said to Cullen with a bright smile, brushing a fine dusting of lyrium out of her hair. She darted in and pressed a quick kiss of thanks to the corner of his mouth, before fade-stepping forward towards those remaining archers.

The battle blurred together, becoming nothing more to Asha than those peaks and troughs of power. Her mind felt clearer than ever. She led the way through the shrine, buoyed not by some kind of punch-drunk mana high, but what felt simply like confidence. She wasn’t scared. These monsters couldn’t hurt her. She was cut a few times and took a blow to the face, but the pain was barely even there, and her barrier was constantly regenerating so everything was muffled within a shell.

When the way was cleared and she turned back, both Bull and Cullen looked winded. Cullen’s shield had a dent in it, possibly from that behemoth. Dorian’s right side of his white robes was bloody. Cole’s chest was barely rising and falling and he looked as unperturbed as she felt, but Cole was a special case. 

“Samson’s not here,” she said - and she supposed it was true. She certainly thought she would’ve noticed if she suddenly found herself facing him. “What’s the plan? Ransack whatever documents are left? Maybe the lyrium here was used for the armour. Does Dagna need more samples?”

“...Maybe Maddox is still here,” Cullen said levelly, squinting a little at her. “Our priority, if Samson is truly gone, is to find him. He’ll tell us about the armour, if we ask him.”

“Because he’ll have no choice in the matter,” she’d meant for that to just be a logical statement, but it became edged with bitterness almost of its own accord.

She hadn’t directed that bitterness at him, and she hoped that was obvious, but Cullen’s concerned look only intensified. “We can try to cure him first, and then ask him, if you’d prefer?”

“Fuck that,” Bull grunted, finally righting himself. It was then that Asha noticed the reason his breathing was laboured - he had a deep cut across his side, bleeding sluggishly across his ribs. “This is not the point in the operation where you make interrogations more difficult. We’ll cure the man _after_ he tells us everything he knows. _If_ he’s even here.”

“Alright then, let’s go,” Asha said, striding towards the door at the end of the hall and expecting the others to follow.

“Love, wait-”

Cullen’s voice was cut off as Asha flung the doors open. A wave of heat crashed over her, and for a moment it left her dizzy. Her vision wavered, before it sharpened, to absolute clarity. The room inside was bathed in crimson light, that writhed and churned the same way her anchor did on her hand. Seething crystals of red lyrium protruded from every corner, casting fiery patterns across the flaming sword emblems that decorated the parts of the wall that were still stone. Asha had felt regret at finding the shrine sacked and emptied out, corpses littering the place - now, she felt a sudden wave of glee, remembering that it was an Order base that burned around them.

Otherwise, the room was empty. She wondered what Cullen’s shout had been trying to warn her of. She supposed there could’ve been another round of an ambush, but she was in better shape than everyone else and her magic was still brimming inside her.

As she continued into the room, she heard someone run up next to her. Cullen caught her arm and tugged her back to his side. “Don’t go anywhere alone,” he said, in a taut voice. 

She felt a brief flare of annoyance, but then remembered that protective flare she’d felt when that behemoth had clobbered him. Cullen was, upon reflection, perfectly capable of handling a behemoth. He drilled people in that very art, in fact. She pulled her arm away and nodded, “sure. You can come with me.”

“I - are you ok?”

“What do you mean?” She asked offhand, as she began walking forward.

He stopped her again, and placed a thumb against her forehead. It came away red. Asha reached up, and felt the side of her head tacky with blood. 

“Huh,” she said. But she didn’t feel any pain, so it was probably fine. “Honestly, I feel fine.”

Cullen was a silent shadow beside her as they walked into the room, his face unreadable as they descended the stairs. This seemed to be some kind of inner sanctum. Aside from the concentration of red lyrium - how had Samson been able to stand being here for any length of time? - there were papers scattered across the floor. Most of them were singed and charred to the point of illegibility. Many crumpled into ash underfoot. There was an overturned desk, the splintered wood of furniture, discarded weapons. An altar, left empty, all iconography removed.

And amongst the destruction, sheltered by the side of a red lyrium vein and watched over by a figure of Andraste: a single slumped body. The figure was so small, against the towering heights of the red lyrium crystal, that it took Asha a moment to notice it and register it for what it was.

It wore mage robes. 

There was a sunburst brand, front and centre, on the body’s forehead. Asha’s brand immediately began to itch, in sympathy.

“Hello, Inquisitor,” said the body, and suddenly the body went from object, a puppet with its strings cut, to man. A handsome, young man, with close cropped hair, practically styled. He must’ve been well taken care of - tranquil had to be ordered to wash, to dress, to stay clean shaven and neaten their appearance… and many people didn’t even think to instil it even as a recurring order. If Asha remembered correctly, _she’d_ had to prompt Miri into make it a longstanding suggestion, because she’d thought it would please her if she maintained some degree of cleanliness.

His face was not slack jawed, simply impassive, flat and without emotion. 

“Maddox,” Cullen breathed, and moved immediately to the man’s side. Asha had stopped a few feet away from the tranquil man and couldn’t seem to close the distance.

Cullen touched the man’s cheek, frowned, and looked up at her. “Something’s wrong,” he said, and Asha noted the way then that, even though Maddox’s face was still blank, he clutched his side as if in pain. It would have to be extreme pain, for a tranquil to even register enough to want to clutch at it.

“He’s hurt-” she said through numb lips.

“-Can you cast resurgence?” Cullen asked her. The question surprised her, because he knew she’d not yet mastered that spell. But she supposed, in this moment, she had enough power for it. She reached for Valour at her hip.

“That would be a waste. Inquisitor, Knight Captain Cullen,” the tranquil told them, with all the affect of a weather report. “I drank my entire supply of blightcap essence. Even if you save me now, you cannot get the toxins out of my blood. My organs will have suffered too much deterioration for me to ever have full functionality again. Resurgence is only temporary. I would likely die even before you got me to a healer.”

Asha’s stomach twisted. She remembered when she would report hurts and injuries and illnesses that same detachment. “Did _he_ order you to do this?” she demanded, fury already boiling inside of her as if she knew the answer.

“If you are asking me if Samson told me to drink the blightcap essence, the answer is no,” Maddox replied blandly. “We spotted you on the road several days ago. He told me we needed to keep him and his Master safe, but we all talked through the means by which we would do so. Together. He often listens to my ideas, and lets me speak when the others are present. When I presented my plan, we all agreed it was best.”

“You... threw your lives away. For _Samson_?” Cullen demanded. "Why?"

“I remember you, Knight Captain Cullen,” Maddox said. “The Order hurt you, but you were never angry. You just… continued on. Samson was angry. He used that anger. He saw a new way forward, where mages and templars do not have to hurt each other. He has purged the Order of its cancerous violence and risen to the side of a magister, who he will put into power. And then the Chantry will fall, as the Circles have already fallen. For all that I cannot care for anything, I care for his vision. I know he is sincere. He saved me even before he needed me. His orders give me purpose.”

“They’re still _orders_.” Asha said.

“Yes, I suppose that matters to you,” Maddox said, tilting his head at her. “As it is important to your sense of wellbeing, I can reassure you that I feel like I have a choice. When I finished working on the armour, Samson asked me if I wanted to leave. I did not want to leave. There was nowhere for me to go.”

“We… we can cure you of tranquility,” she said, aware that while his voice was level and congenial, hers was already beginning to break, “that’s what we wanted to do. We were going to ask you some questions, and then - it only takes contact with a spirit -”

“I see. That is kind of you, to want that for me,” Maddox said, and by the Creators it seemed more out of politeness than anything. “But for such a thing to be delivered on those terms would be uncomfortable. I do not want to answer your questions.”

“You want to protect Samson.” Cullen said grimly.

“Yes.”

Asha swiped angrily at her cheek as a single, impotent tear came loose. Whereas minutes before she’d felt nigh invulnerable, now all she felt was…

“Tell me what you want, _right now,_ ” she said, “you. Maddox, alone. Not thinking of anyone else." She swallowed, "That’s an order.”

Cullen cast her a worried look, but she was too focused on Maddox.

The mages processed the question. “I think… I would like the pain to end… and-” 

“I can cure you. I will open a rift right this moment and I’ll pull a spirit through-”

She thought that proclamation might frighten Cullen - seemed like the kind of pledge that would send a templar’s senses tingling. But all that happened was that the worry in his eyes became _pitying_. He spoke, gently, “Love, with the blightcap in his system-”

“- and I want to help… him,” Maddox said, in a soft voice, interrupting Cullen’s words as he finished his sentence.

Asha froze. _“I am here because I want to help”_. She remembered when she had said those words, and meant them: when she’d come to the Conclave to testify. The distinction was probably one that only a tranquil would notice: you could ‘help’, you could ‘assist’ - rarely did you _want_ to. She’d only said such things in the one instance where an order, though given, had broken through the muffled barrier of her existence and gotten down into whatever was allowed to remain of her. 

Maddox wasn’t lying. He truly had made a choice. A choice that was coerced, because he couldn’t actually consent… But it didn’t matter. He meant it. He might truly believe in Samson’s vision - and why wouldn’t he, when the mages had forsaken him and all that was left was this? This was as close to autonomy as he could get. And who was she to deny that?

It wasn’t his fault. They’d come too late. If they’d known about him, if Asha was better at healing, if she had brought Solas with her -

"This room..." Maddox murmured, "it feels... strange..."

The mage’s body slumped. There was a rasp, barely recognisable as a breath. Then there was silence. And that was when Asha’s vision began to fuzz at the edges.

“What a waste,” Cullen said, sounding wretched. And for a second the pain was so fresh and the room so stifling that Asha thought that he meant, _of an asset_. They hadn’t got any of the information they needed about the armour before he passed. She felt a wild lash of anger that made her want to set fire mines under his feet, and watch this place burn all the more.

But no, no, no... that wasn’t right. That was _Cullen_. 

She took in a deep gulping breath that became a sob. Pressure built up in her chest.

Cullen looked over at her. She saw the heartbreak written in his face at the sight of her in pain. He was _disappointed_ in Maddox’s death, but he was only sad for her. “Love, I’m so sorry. We came too late. There was nothing we could’ve done for him.”

Her vision blurred. But she didn’t want to cry. 

There _was_ something she could’ve done for him. She could’ve come sooner. She could’ve stopped Samson already. She could’ve reclaimed Sarnhia in the autumn on the way back from Halamshiral, rather than spend her winter snuggled up under covers, languidly fucking Cullen like that would be what saved the world. 

This wasn’t _sadness_. It wasn’t even guilt -

This was rage.

That magic was back - the sparkling, frothing, overflowing kind. She felt connected to the stonework. To the lyrium in the stonework. To the veins that ran through it like roots. 

She could tear this whole wretched place down if she wanted to. This was the Order’s stronghold. Samson would see the smoking wreckage, and he would know. Know that she was coming for him next.

“Asha-” the voice came to her through a haze. “Love, please don’t cry-”

“Oh, dear,” came the faint voice of Dorian, from somewhere near the door.

“The song, the screams, it’s getting louder,” that was Cole, and he seemed closer. She had no idea what he was talking about.

_Her friends._ The rage didn't care about them, but she did. She couldn’t hurt them.

_Just destroy it all_ , came a voice, soft and sourceless, in her head. 

...And Asha fade-stepped away before she could do anything foolish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry guys. This is an angsty af cliffhanger, completely accidentally. 
> 
> I'm hoping to continue posting next weekend but I am moving home for Christmas (safely, after observing quarantine)! So I may skip a week depending on how moving goes. As always, I can promise you that this is hurt with comfort, and angst with a happy ending.
> 
> I hope everyone is well. ^^


	80. Chapter Eighty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath (such a cheesy summary but oh well!)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: sexy fade-to-black times, references to past abuse

Asha re-materialised on the outskirts of camp.

Camp was over a mile away. 

No fade step should’ve taken her that far. Not in that amount of time, and not without killing her. Her breath came out heavy and white on the air, as a shiver travelled violently down her spine, shaking every single one of her bones.

But more importantly, she didn’t want to be in camp. Because she wanted to _hurt_ something, and even as that urge uncoiled and rose wildly within her, she wasn’t quite so far gone as to want to destroy the only things between her friends and the elements.

Instead, Asha blindly walked away from their clearing, losing herself in among the trees. Her breath was coming in harsh pants now, and she was still shaking. Hard enough to set her teeth on edge. It could still be with the cold - she didn’t know. Her vision blurred, tears thwacked onto the frost beneath her feet. She felt dangerous and out-of-control.

In the end, it was all too much. Pressure built in her chest, and she couldn’t tell if it was pain or magic, or a combination of both. Someone screamed, and then the ground ahead of her exploded in a dark, impenetrable rain of dirt, that arced almost ten feet up in the air. The force of it made her stumble back. Some of the dirt and grit got in her mouth, and then she swallowed against a sore throat, and realised the scream had come from her. Somewhere among the smouldering wreckage, as the chunks of earth finished raining down in a dark cloud, she noticed the partial scorch mark of a fire mine glyph, that she didn’t remember casting. 

Time went a little fluid after that. She had so much power, and nothing - absolutely _nothing_ \- she could do with it. So she just flung it around impotently, revelling in the destruction. 

A while later, she heard footsteps. 

She was on her knees in the fire scorched earth, her mind finally, utterly blank. All her mana finally spent. Her cheeks were freezing cold, and she thought that might be because they were wet, but she couldn’t really remember crying, only shrieking and screaming. Her hands were palm up and resting on her thighs, dark circles underneath her fingernails from where she’d clawed the dirt. She supposed she should get up, make herself presentable and not a wild mess for whoever had found her first. But she couldn’t seem to make herself move.

The footsteps stopped. “Oh, thank the Maker,” came a soft voice, breathless and harried, and Asha immediately knew who it was, and then she was crying again. A shadow covered her as Cullen knelt down. His arms came round her, and it was only as she was enveloped in warmth that she truly knew how much the cold had leaked into her bones.

She tried to say some words, but all that came out was incoherence. Cullen, carefully, tugged her back against him, and then into his lap. For a moment she flailed, defensive and indignant, unused to being comforted. She might even have caught his chin with a glancing blow that held very little heft behind it. But he kept her with him, and then she shifted, curled up on her side so that her shoulder rested against his chest. She let him hold her as she sobbed. He made those absurd shushing noises that somehow still seemed to work, and stroked her hair.

“I’m so sorry, Asha, I’m so sorry,” he repeated, over and over.

“Of course you’re sorry,” she said vehemently, at one point, in a voice she didn’t recognise as her own, “we can’t get _Samson_ now. This whole fucking journey was fucking _useless_. _I’m_ fucking useless!”

“There’s nothing you could have done.”

“What’s the point of being like this?” she shrieked, “what’s the point? I’m lucky, I’m always _so_ lucky… but we have the cure now! And there’s just… there’s just no one! There’s no one! No one left! The Circles didn’t even _care_ -”

She tried to push him off, then. He was, as always, ungodly strong. She beat his chest, but she couldn’t bring herself to overpower him as she would in the sparring arena. She tried calling him some names, just because that once would’ve been more than enough to scare him off, but hurting him just seemed to hurt _her_ more. Most of the insults were lost to sobs. He held her resolutely, until her crying became hacking coughs, like she was a child who’d thrown a tantrum to the point of tiring themselves out.

After a while, things lapsed into silence. Cullen still didn’t relax his hold on Asha, even for a moment. Boneless and spent, she finally rested her cheek against his chest, closing her eyes. He was in his armour, but she tried to pretend she could hear the thump of his heart and take comfort from it. What she did feel was the press of his lips on the top of her head. Somehow, he still loved her, and that knowledge made her let out a long, exhausted sigh. She didn’t know how much time it had taken to wring herself dry, but she was too tired to feel mortified about it. 

“...How did you find me?” she mumbled. She had no idea where she was.

“I… followed the smoke,” Cullen replied, carefully. When Asha cracked one eye open to look at the clearing around them, she saw enough damage, in a wide enough circle, to make her wince. 

She hastily closed both eyes again. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” his voice was unexpectedly fierce. “We’re nowhere. I’d rather be able to find you.”

His arms tightened around her like a vice to the point of being uncomfortable, but she found she was clinging on just as tightly. A few more minutes passed in silence. It began to dawn on her how fucking cold it was - it was still a couple of weeks ahead of Wintersend. By unspoken agreement - or maybe just once she fully began shivering - they hauled themselves both up to their feet. Cullen cupped her cheeks in his hands, and thumbed away the tear tracks that had left her face blotchy and swollen. Then, he took her hand, and they walked back to the camp, as the sky began to darken overhead. It took nearly half an hour, which was longer than Asha was expecting. She was actually almost impressed with her own self control - that she’d managed to hold the rage at bay that long. 

When they came back into camp, Bull, Dorian, and Cole were all there, looking a little worried and uncomfortable. “Do you want to talk to them?” Cullen asked her softly. Asha shook her head. 

Hands still tightly clasped, he led her over to their tent and all but steered her inside. She sat down with a thud, cross legged and dull at the edges, and he closed the tent flap with one final look in on her. She heard murmurs from outside: “Did you find anything?”

“We found enough,” Bull replied, “some tools, some notes on the armour. The arcanist will probably be able to make more sense of it.”

“What I could understand seemed promising, though,” Dorian added as clarification.

“And the body?”

“Nothing fancy,” Bull said. “Took it out of the ruins. Buried it.”

“That will have to do,” Cullen replied with a sigh, “the only other place I can think of is Kirkwall, and I highly doubt he’d ever have wanted to go back there.”

“The anger,” said Cole, suddenly. “Her anger. It was different this time.” 

Dorian hastily shushed him.

“All failures sting. But I think this one hit rather close to home, my man,” said Bull, clapping Cole on the shoulder. 

It was around that point that Asha just laid back under the covers, fully clothed, and gave herself the gift of unconsciousness.

When she woke up, it was the dead of night, so dark that she couldn’t even see her hand in front of her face. And next to her, pressed tight against the side of her body, arms slung over her and caging her in, chin resting on her shoulder, was Cullen. He'd somehow positioned himself in such a careful way that she hadn’t stirred or felt him move once. Anchoring her down, as if afraid she might disappear. 

Asha couldn’t really see him. She could only feel the heat and shape of him in the darkness, breath stirring her hair and misting her neck lightly. But she moved anyway to face him, shifting so that she was on her right side and his head shared her pillow. Her anchor arm was pinned under the covers, meaning the darkness remained absolute. She reached and stroked across his cheek, carded her hand through his hair. He made a low grumble in the darkness.

The emotion that welled up this time, uncontrollable and unstoppable in her chest, was so overbearingly sweet that her first reaction was guilt. Hours ago, she’d been devastated, as if a man’s death meant more because it happened in front of her, rather than because of the loss of the life itself. And now she was… what? All better? Her fury and anger wiped away because someone else was willing to bear it for her, suffer through it with her? 

No. Because someone had looked after her. _Helped_ her. And let her weather the storm.

Asha wasn’t used to being comforted. Not like this. Not when she was at her ugliest, and her most dangerous. She supposed she’d had Cole, who had felt like it was his duty to look after her, and who hadn’t feared her even a little because he was a spirit himself. Cullen, on the other hand... there was probably a small part of him that was scared of her, or scared _for_ her. But he’d protected her anyway. 

Asha couldn’t stop it - that wellspring of love exploding in her chest - even if she wanted to. It was so irresistible that she suddenly came to the conclusion that there was no point feeling guilty about it. Instead, she chose to revel in it. Like a tide coming in, she blindly leaned forward until her nose brushed Cullen’s nose, which was all she had in the darkness to indicate that she was in the right position. The hand still under covers tangled in the material of his shirt. She pressed her mouth over where she thought his was. When she missed slightly and got mostly scar, she adjusted accordingly, and kissed more forcefully. There was a confused, questioning noise from him, that still sounded half asleep, and the hand that had been stroking his hair suddenly anchored in his curls and she just kissed him harder, without art or artifice, opening his mouth with hers. 

When she finally roused him to full wakefulness, his hands shifted down to cradle her waist. “Asha,” he said, between kisses that she refused to let stop, and he didn’t put up a fight to resist, “love. What-?”

She moved as well. There was a blossom of emerald light as her hand moved out from under their blankets, came up to his face, and tugged him down into another long, searching kiss. The anchor illuminated them and the tent canvas around them. Asha had no clue what she looked like. Probably ugly and haggard, and slightly sticky from all the crying. She might be covered in a layer of dirt from all those firemines she’d detonated. But what she did see was his face: eyes sleepy and dazed and dark. A little confused from waking. Vulnerable. Full of concern. Care. Love.

She kissed him again. She kept kissing him until there were far less clothes, and he was very much awake. And panting. And just as urgent and mindless as she was.

“I love you,” was all she said. All she could say. She pulled him closer, wrapping a leg over him, arching up against him and pulling at the same time, so he had nowhere else to go. “ _Please._ ”

Afterward, she lay pillowed against his arm, anchored hand resting atop the blankets to give them both some light. The sweat was already chilling against her bare skin, and raising gooseflesh with every late winter breeze that wheedled its way into their tent. She had no idea what time it was, but from that strange, empty quality, she guessed it was the very early hours of the morning, where they were the only ones awake.

“I… had a question,” he said, softly, just a whisper of breath in her ear. “But you don’t have to answer it.”

She gave a long, blissed-out sigh of satisfaction, nuzzling along his jaw. “Sure. I’m in a giving mood.”

“...What was tranquility like?”

Asha locked up, satiated glow dropping away in seconds. She’d been expecting… gods, what question had she actually been expecting? What her favourite colour was? What her love life had been like before him? Whether or not she wanted him to stay living with her permanently? 

Cullen pressed his lips to the side of her head, somewhere near the eyebrow, as if trying to calm her. “As I said, you don’t have to answer. It’s just… it was such a huge part of your life. I thought it might be something I ought to know. I would like to understand what it was like. Whether what I’m thinking is too much... or too little.”

He left the question hanging without any judgement, and for a good minute of silence, Asha considered just not saying anything. Just drawing out the quiet, until they both fell back into sated sleep. 

But at the same time…

“It’s a lie,” she told him, quietly. “Not just that it stops demons possessing you - you know that from Cassandra. But that it stops you from feeling things. I was still… I was always _there_. And sometimes, I’d reach out for emotions, and feel them for a second or two. Try to grasp at them. Some part of me would know I was meant to be scared, or angry, or… well, I never really encountered anything that would make me happy, I guess. Maybe when I met the Ostwick mages? But all those emotions that I was reaching for… they’d just slip away. Dissolve. Or the tranquility would rise up and block them from me, cage me in.”

Her heart was pounding. The only other person she’d told this kind of thing to was Ellana.

“And pain,” she said. “You still feel pain. You just can’t really react to it. You feel the sensation, but none of the stuff that tells you what to do with it. It’s stupid that people think for even a second that that stuff doesn’t matter anymore. Just because you can’t scream or cry about it, doesn’t mean you’re not still bleeding.”

Cullen didn’t say anything, but the arm looped around her waist tightened imperceptibly. She gripped at it with the unanchored hand.

She swallowed, listened to his racing heartrate underneath her, and continued. “Nothing bad happened, really. Not compared to what could’ve taken place. Not compared to those horror stories Varric told me, about Kirkwall. But everyone just treats you like a tool. They make you do the tasks they don’t want to do, because you don’t complain about it. I remember…” she frowned, she did remember, though the memories faded like a bleeding watercolour, “I remember after the inn, I worked in a laundry. I think at an estate? Or a... castle? That was where the mages found me - they stopped in when travelling from the College of Magi back to Ostwick and realised who I was. Anyway, they didn’t treat me badly. The staff there, they kept me like a pet. Fed me, clothed me, let me sleep by a fire. But they always gave me the hardest things to clean. Because I was the best at cleaning. You would order me to do it, and I would, until it was done. And because they were the worst stains, the water was always scalding, and the lye would leave blisters, and I’d scrub and scrub and scrub until it was clean again. Even things that were so old they were stained to begin with. They gave me things to wash like it was… an experiment. Which sounds stupid, but it was everything, just all my waking hours until they remembered to tell me to sleep: clothes, aprons, curtains, tablecloths, bedsheets - bedsheets after sex, after illnesses, after deaths. And everything always came out spotless, because those were the orders I’d been given. Three months, and by the end the skin on my hands was like dragon scales. They were so sore. I’d pick things up and I’d bleed.”

She let out a deep huffing breath, that only shook a little at the end. “Nothing cruel. Nothing… _deliberately_ cruel. They just used me, because I was useful. Why wouldn’t they? No one ever shows a tranquil kindness. They think it doesn’t register or make a difference. Even the mages were only kind because they needed me in one piece to tip into the Conclave’s lap. To point at me and say ‘look what the templars did!’ That’s why - If Maddox-” she stopped, cut off, and tried again, “if Samson-”

Asha decided it wasn’t worth continuing, and instead lapsed into silence. There wasn’t really anything more she could say, that wouldn’t hurt either or both of them. She’d stopped at exactly the right point, where she felt lighter for having shared these secrets, but hadn’t dealt the two of them any new wounds.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t save Maddox,” he told her gently. “It’s not your fault.”

“Isn’t it? We just wanted to use him, too.”

“We would’ve saved him.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, and burrowed down until she was surrounded by blankets and Cullen’s warmth. “But he didn’t know that. He just thought we’d interrogate him and then toss him aside. And six months and one deranged seeker earlier, he would’ve been completely right.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” he argued, pressing a kiss to her brow almost like a challenge, “you would never have let that happen. You would’ve cared for him until the end of his days.”

“I-” She tried to argue, but ended up falling into a slightly indignant silence. The bastard was completely right.

“Thank you for telling me.” his fingertip traced her hairline, pulling curls away from her face with the bare whisper of a touch, “you didn’t have to. I’m glad you felt that you could trust me.”

“You’re right, it was probably time,” Asha sighed, again. “At this rate, I’ll be the only witness we ever find.”

Cullen’s hand stilled, but he didn’t respond or tell her that it wasn’t true. Instead, he said, “...I promise you, we will make Samson pay.”

Asha opened her mouth, then closed it again. It was late. She didn’t think now was the time to explain to Cullen... that she wasn’t necessarily sure this was something Samson _needed_ to pay for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry pals, I promise you I'm delivering two chapters again this week after missing last week's, they're just a little late because of a family dinner last night! I'll post another one tomorrow!
> 
> I've been writing more while work is winding down. I hope everyone is well :D xx


	81. Chapter Eighty-One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Return to Skyhold.

“I hope Solas can make sense of these,” Asha said, folding up the hastily drawn maps - that she thought might be the Arbor Wilds, there _were_ sketches of trees. They were among the notes scrounged from the ruins of the Shrine of Dumat. She stuffed them back in her satchel. Two weeks of looking at them, trying to convince herself that their trek hadn’t been a violent waste of their time. That they were somehow as useful and worthwhile as a live Maddox. And of course they weren’t - not even close - but she could tell they had some kind of merit, even if she couldn’t glean it herself. 

Cullen gave her a flat look.

“I know, I know,” she said guiltily. “I shouldn’t have just left him in Skyhold in a fit of pique.”

“Wait…” Dorian said, incredulously. “You were planning on bringing _Solas_ on this little mission?! ...Thank the Maker you didn’t! Can you imagine how awkward that would’ve been? It was awkward for _me_ , and I don’t fancy either of you!”

"That is a blatant lie," Asha pointed out to him. She remembered exactly how often he used to ogle Cullen's ass. “...And I suppose you thought you were being _subtle_ , on our travel back from Adamant?”

“Ah, stones. Meet glass houses.” Dorian exclaimed, as their horses crossed the boundary into Skyhold's walls and strolled into the courtyard. “Yes, Inquisitor, you caught me: I love to have sex. Are you sure that this is a topic that you, personally, want to bring to the table? Bull and I are far less repressed about these things than the two of you. In fact, we can now all gauge just how very, very repressed the two of you are - given that we have some inkling as to how you conduct yourselves in _private_.”

“Pervert.”

“My darling Asha, that rather implies that I had _any kind of choice_ in what I did or did not overhear.”

“You were _quite_ loud, at times,” Cole confided in her quietly, as they stabled the horses. “And I can’t even hear thoughts anymore.”

“I- you-” Asha was left spluttering and red-faced, as Cole gave her a small, slightly gloating smile, before drifting silently away towards the castle. _Oh my gods_ , she thought as she watched his retreating form, _did he gain a sense of humour while he was away?_

And were _Bull and Dorian_ the ones who’d had a shaping hand in it?!! It honestly didn’t bear thinking about.

“I don’t know why they’re painting all this as some kind of romantic getaway,” she grumbled at Cullen, as they trudged hand-in-hand through the damp, muddy courtyard. It was after nightfall, and rainy, so no hero’s welcome for them on the return of this particular trip. “Did you find the multitude of templar corpses to be an aphrodisiac, at your end, dearest?”

She personally thought they’d had a perfectly standard, healthy amount of sex, given the circumstances. But maybe she was just being particularly Dalish about it all - as Bull had once pointed out to her, she’d lived a life where she considered a tent’s four walls enough privacy, and apparently everyone else’s standards were higher than that. Still. She didn’t think they’d been particularly untoward. Neither had Bull or Dorian. Again: all things considered. Everyone had been very, very stressed, and they’d all reacted accordingly. 

“I’m actually a little amazed we’re still together, quite frankly,” he replied. He sounded brutally honest, with only the slightest hint of levity to try and make it into a joke. 

Asha didn’t begrudge him the sincerity - it really was quite a feat, and she thought they both deserved a little acknowledgement for their achievement. It wasn’t just that this entire trip had felt particularly tailored to torture them and make them hate each other. The fact they’d made it all the way back to Skyhold from Northern Orlais in under two weeks was a testament to how fucking awful the mission had been. for everyone involved. Bull had even bought them celebratory ice cream, in a fancy patisserie in Val Royeaux, as they waited for their ship to let them board. Ice cream. Paid for, by the coffers of _the Iron Bull_.

“I suppose that must mean I love you, sooo very much,” she sang at him, and felt that quick flare of satisfaction at the fact that the words still made him blush. But then, she supposed she still enjoyed making him blush, so they were perfectly matched in that regard.

“Disgusting,” was Ellana’s blunt assessment. Her sister and Varric were both still awake and waiting for them at their usual table in the throne room. El looked down at their clasped hands, and then up at Cullen, “I guess we’re stuck with you, then?”

Cullen stuttered, and blushed some more. He even rubbed the back of his neck bashfully - a trick he hadn’t pulled in a while.

“For the foreseeable future,” Asha confirmed, rescuing the poor man from himself. Her chest felt a little warm, the way any Dalish elf’s would whenever their partners got included by their family in any use of ‘we’. “Even wild, rabid red templars couldn’t keep us apart, it seems. And believe me, they gave it a good go.”

“She even calls him _vhenan'ara_ now!” Dorian threw over his shoulder, mangling the elvhen shamelessly from where he and Bull stood at the far end of the room, peeling off their sopping outer clothes

“Oh, gods,” Ellana groaned.

“That is just… uncalled for!” Asha shouted back, angrily.

“It’s fine,” Cullen reassured her in a quiet whisper. “They have pet names for each other, too.”

Ellana rolled her eyes to the very heavens. This time Asha was the one blushing. It was awful when _other_ people knew what the words mean. 

“ _So, he’s the one, then?_ ” her sister asked her later in elvhen, as they were ensconced in the Herald’s Rest and Asha was enjoying herself, fully, for possibly the first time in months. The tavern was sleepy and warm, and more importantly, she and everyone she loved was home, safe.

“ _How am I supposed to know that?_ ” Asha snapped back, embarrassed and defensive for reasons even she couldn’t understand. If she took a moment to consider the question, she thought he might be, actually. But how did you admit those kinds of things, and how did you make your peace with them, when you hadn’t thought that they were really possible, in the longest time? “ _I know he’s not perfect-_ ”

“ _Oh, I’m actually pretty certain he is,_ ” Ellana cast an appreciative glance over to the bar, where Cullen seemed to be leaning against the counter and catching up with Cabot, of all people. That friendship was rather surprising even to Asha, given that Cullen was such a workaholic and rarely here unless she dragged him in that direction. “ _And you used to accuse me of being shallow…_ ”

“Ellana.”

“ _Oh, look at your face! Hush, I’m only teasing,_ ” her sister gave a small, very pleased smile, like it was exciting and novel to be able to provoke Asha to this kind of reaction. “ _But I mean it. I read your letters - well, Josie read them for me. If you went through all that stuff together, slaughtering templars and turning down demons and… He’s probably a good guy. Or at least-_ ”

“Not a templar,” Asha finished for her in Common, given that those words didn’t really work in their vocabulary.

“And let’s be honest, that was really his only flaw,” El replied, with another appreciative glance that made Asha want to slap her, just a little. “Or at least, the only thing that was holding _you_ back, apparently.”

“...What’s that supposed to mean?!”

“I mean, I got _Dorian’s_ updates as well,” Ellana said, with a serene, infuriating smile. “Leliana was the one who ended up reading me those. They upset Josie’s delicate sensibilities. I think she was more invested in you two when it was all playing out sexless, like a courtly romance.”

“Oh, for the love of… will you all fuck off! I’m an adult! _I’m allowed to have sex!_ ” Asha cried out. Not in elvhen. Just... _very_ loudly. 

And the tavern was really very quiet, midweek in Guardian, when Wintersend had been two days prior. At the bar, Cullen froze up. Cabot said something with a chuckle that Asha couldn’t quite overhear. The Commander blushed, and then simply ordered her a very large whiskey.

_You have been off lyrium for over a year. You suffered through acute withdrawal for_ months _. You worked under_ Meredith _for years,_ Cullen told himself sternly, as he stalled at the door to the library and searched for any excuse not to go in. _This isn’t going to be anywhere near as torturous. You can very easily do this_.

Still, that didn’t stop a sinking feeling in his gut as he finally walked into the rotunda. Solas was sat at his desk, calmly reading a book in a language Cullen didn’t recognise. Cullen found himself wondering slightly pettily, as he thought back over the shit they’d delved through in the last few months, whether the man had moved far from that desk the entire winter. 

Solas didn’t bother to look up until he was stood, like a lemon, right by the edge of his desk, for almost a minute. When Cullen finally cleared his throat (which, even he had to admit, made him sound like a pillock), the mage raised his face serenely, as if he’d known he was there the whole time, but considered talking to him a task he was entitled to get to in his own time.

“I, err, need to speak with you about something,” Cullen said through gritted teeth.

That earned him a derisive look, and a single: “Oh?”

Cullen glanced up at the upper levels of the library. By some divine favour, Dorian wasn’t there to crow while all this unfolded, but then, he thought everyone involved in the Shrine of Dumat mission had elected to sleep for several days before they dived wholeheartedly into preparations for the Arbor Wilds. Asha, he knew, was preoccupied with Leliana and Dagna, discussing the findings from Dumat and how precisely they could use them. Still, he didn’t want an audience of even impassive participants, given the nature of what he wanted to discuss.

“In my office, if you wouldn’t mind?”

Solas raised a single eyebrow, but said and did nothing more as he silently put his belongings away and followed Cullen, out of the library and across the walkway. 

Once inside, Cullen moved behind his desk, and gestured for the other man to take the seat on the opposite side. Solas still didn’t say a word as he complied, all the while watching with that same impassive, placid stare. It seemed almost directly lifted from the Vivienne school of ‘mildly inconvenienced and wanting to make everyone extremely aware of it’, though neither mage would thank him if he noted the similarity aloud. 

Cullen wondered if Solas thought he was going to talk about something foolish and juvenile - perhaps ask him to stay away from Asha, or at least keep his thoughts about their relationship to himself. Part of him was tempted, honestly… if only because it would somehow have made for an easier conversation than the one he was about to have.

“What was it you wanted to discuss?” Solas asked, finally, his one concession to the awkwardness of their current situation.

“I wanted to talk to you…” Cullen said, taking a deep breath and steeling himself, “...about lyrium.”

Solas was actually surprised. But he recovered quickly, and fought to hide it by casting him another pointedly unimpressed glance. “I would’ve rather thought that was _your_ realm of expertise.” 

_Templar,_ was the unspoken word tagged onto the end of that sentence.

And suddenly, everything got easier. The revelation that Solas’ mystic, serene exterior was a pretence designed to hide the completely fallible, slightly catty man underneath did wonders for Cullen’s confidence, as well as for his desire to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible.

“Quite obviously,” he replied, “my knowledge lies in how it affects templars. What I need to discuss with you is how it affects mages.”

“Again, this seems like a topic better suited to others’ expertise,” Solas said. “ _I_ -” and yes, he did emphasise it, the bastard, “- have never had the ability, nor need, to take the stuff. Perhaps if you ask Madame de Fer…”

“I suppose I should’ve been more specific, and that is my mistake,” Cullen interrupted. “I’m talking about _red_ lyrium.” 

Again, Solas looked a little surprised and, as Asha had described to Cullen in passing before, suddenly intrigued, as if his attention had finally been snagged, and somewhat against his will. 

“We’ve catalogued the effects on red templars,” Cullen continued. “The violence, the paranoia and possession, as was displayed in Meredith Stannard. The obvious symptoms of exposure: the red glow, the crystals, and wider transformation into shadows and behemoths and what have you. There is multiple documented accounts of some kind of ‘song’, from the victims themselves. We know it enhances their physicality, but impacts templar magics, and means that they are no longer able to cast Silence spells or purges. What, would you theorise, would be the affect of red lyrium on mages?”

“I’m…” Solas frowned, thinking. “I’m not entirely sure.”

“Neither am I. All we really have to go on is Asha’s accounts of Redcliffe, which was a snapshot of roughly two hours,” Cullen told him, getting past the name with only the briefest of pauses as the hostility in the room intensified. “In her accounts, both you and Vivienne exhibited the glow of red lyrium, but were able to function perfectly well even after your prolonged exposure. The same could not be said for the Grand Enchanter, however-”

“I would’ve thought of that as a logical consequence of the types of exposure we are discussing, Commander,” Solas said. “After all, mages do not need to ingest lyrium, as templars do. And when we do… when templars take lyrium, it affects the physical body, _makes_ it magical. But with mages it goes merely towards replenishing the inherent mana supply. It is immediately drawn to that connection with the Fade, which eats away at it... 'feeds' on it, if you will, and keeps it from affecting other parts of the body so extensively. Hence the lack of addiction in magi unless they down the stuff by the gallon." And at least this time, he didn’t make the mention pointed, merely clinical. 

He continued, “the formation of crystals within the body seems to be a result of directly taking the stuff. So I imagine Fiona was force fed, whereas Vivienne and I simply suffered from close proximity, in the prison cells Asha described.”

“What would you say to the hypothesis,” Cullen asked, carefully, dread filling him as he put his thoughts, for the first time, into words, “that red lyrium boosts a mage’s magic?”

This time, Solas was silent for a while, mulling the question over. As he did so, Cullen thought back to Asha in Sahrnia quarry, and to the clearing in which he’d found her after Maddox’s death. Which he was pretty sure had not been a clearing before she’d gotten to it. He didn’t want to worry her with conclusions that he wasn’t entirely sure were accurate, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something beyond the mood swings of reversed tranquility had been affecting her in those moments.

“I would say…” Solas said, finally, shaking Cullen out of the worries that had now plagued him for weeks, “that that wouldn’t actually... make any sense. That is what _normal_ lyrium does to a mage. In its corrupted form, with whatever properties that allows it to access the Fade so directly interfered with, I’d be very, very surprised if red lyrium proved to be a more effective method of boosting mana. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the Venatori be taking it under the Elder One’s direction? They merely use it to poison and convert other non-magical humans, rather than themselves.”

That actually… felt completely logical, and quite reassuring. Although he really was a bit of a wanker, Cullen thought he trusted Solas’ judgement on these things. He nodded, then sighed with relief. “That’s good to hear. Thank you.” 

Perhaps it had just been the heightened emotion of what had proven to be a very trying couple of weeks. Asha’s magic had peaked and troughed many times before, under stress.

“I would obviously point out, that that is just my assessment, without any testing or evidence with which to prove it,” Solas replied calmly. His gaze sharpened a little, “Why? What would you do, if it did?”

“What? If it did indeed magical powers? ...I’d probably try and keep mages away from it?” _As we’re already doing_.

As he should’ve perhaps foreseen, that played right into whatever controversy Solas had been hoping to provoke. “Yes, the Maker forbid we ever prove _dangerous_.” He voiced the name of Cullen's god with disdain.

“Yes, yes, Maker forbid if we were to have an unstoppably powerful army guaranteed to perfectly match and even overpower Samson’s, in the Wilds," Cullen shot back, voice cooling to match his, before he clarified, "I wasn’t looking for way to give our mages an advantage, _or_ a disadvantage. I’m far more concerned about who exactly would be _‘in danger’_ , in that scenario. The stuff is quite literally cursed.”

“Well. Given that its ‘curse’ directly interrupts and twists the Order’s own connection to magic, I think it would be highly likely to do the same if it were to interact directly with the connection of a mage.”

“So it’s awful _and_ it has no benefits,” Cullen surmised. “Truly, that is more reassuring than you could possibly know.”

“I didn’t know mage welfare ranked so high in your priorities.”

Cullen levelled his own unimpressed glare at Solas, who perhaps realised that while the remark may not have overstepped the line, it acknowledged it with so much force that he might as well have fished chalk out of his pocket and physically drawn it. 

“I have _some_ reasons to be invested,” Cullen replied, evenly. 

And then, with the kind of timing that really made you wonder about fate, the door between the library and his office was nudged open. Asha entered, fresh-faced and holding two steaming mugs of coffee. “I’m guessing you’re already drowning in work, you _absolute masochist_ , but I thought we could both take a moment to celebrate, you know, not fighting for our lives for the first day in months, and also _having walls back,_ ” she said, unsuccessfully blowing an errant lock of hair out of her face as she shoulder-barged her way in, engrossed in manoeuvring so that she was careful not to spill anything. “Which was not a very Dalish thing of me to say, but you know, _Dorian_ and-”

She froze, realising there was another person in the room. “Oh, hello,” she said, looking a little awkward. “Am I…”

She didn’t even seem to want to finish that sentence. Cullen wondered if it was because of the fact that she hadn’t spoken to Solas since yelling at him, or if she was just dreading whatever the two of them had been discussing. 

“Don’t mind me - I believe that Commander and I had finished our conversation,” Solas said smoothly with barely a hint of emotion, already retreating towards the door. He placed his hand on Asha’s arm - not with any intention to provoke, just in such a way that made it seem that he wanted to confirm she was alive and well. “ _Lethallan_ , it is good to have you back.”

“Oh! Believe me, it’s good to _be_ back,” Asha said, with feeling. She raised an eyebrow, “You might be an utter dick when you’re angry with me, but I’ll take you over ravening red templars and know-it-all desire demons, any day.”

“Ahh, and that is what I missed about you, Inquisitor,” Solas said, with a small, reserved smile. “You always do wonders for a man’s ego.”

“So…” she said, hesitantly, after she'd edged into the room and Solas had nondescriptly edged out of it. She waited until the door swung shut behind him, before hissing, “what the fuck was that about?”

“Naturally, I’ve just challenged him to a duel at dawn,” Cullen deadpanned. “An insult to my woman is an insult to my honour, and it must be satisfied.”

“Oh my goodness, Dorian was right, you _did_ get sassy,” she grinned. She moved closer, placed both coffees on the worktop, and began ingratiating herself, somehow, in the scant space between him and his desk. There was a mischievous glint in her eye as she rested herself atop it, craned her neck and wrapped her arms around his waist, as if she knew precisely what she was doing, and what it was doing to him. “One day, you might even tell a joke without any sarcasm, and the entire world will perish.”

“And one day, you might say something nice about me without feeling the need to turn it into an insult, and then maybe Corypheus will fling himself into the Void and save us all the trouble and effort.”

“See! Look at that! I’m so proud!” She beamed, dipping and pressing a very distracting kiss to his collarbone through his shirt, the easiest place to reach with her height. “Anyway, try to keep your duelling swords sheathed,” she waggled her eyebrows, in full awareness of the innuendo. “Solas has apparently been working one-on-one with Morrigan the entire time we’ve been away. From what Leliana just told me, I couldn’t have visited a worse punishment on him even if I’d tried. Lots of ego clashes, but you know, the really polite, meticulously bitchy kind.”

“But, has he actually apologised?”

“...No,” she admitted. She rested her chin on his shoulder, pulling him into a hug that necessitated him stepping in between her legs, so that she enveloped him in warmth and softness. “But then, I haven’t spoken more words to him than what you just witnessed, and he’s not really the type.”

“I could… try and make him?” Cullen said, not really sure how he would even go about doing so. The uncertainty in his voice seemed to amuse Asha to no end.

“That’s sweet of you, but no, there’s truly no duelling needed. We’ll smooth things over eventually,” she paused, and leant back a little, so there was a breath between them, and a very speculative glint in her eye. “...Unless this proposed duel was going to be done shirtless. Is it going to be done shirtless?”

“Maker preserve me, woman,” he sighed, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back into fluffier territory!! Thank goodness. We have a little breather before fun dramatic times in the Arbor Wilds. <3
> 
> Hope you're all enjoying yourselves. The only chapter note is that I made all of the lyrium lore stuff up. It's not canon, it just sounded vaguely plausible to me :) xx


	82. Chapter Eighty-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wicked Grace at Skyhold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: sexy stuff, fade-to-black as always

“So, I just want to make this clear now: if I get drunk-”

“-‘If’.”

Asha glared over at him, before continuing, “-And if I happen to get handsy-” there was another scoff, but she continued without pause, “and more importantly, if my partner doesn’t insist on being an _insufferable smartass_... then please take this as my full, knowing consent. Right now.” 

She laced up her boots and stood up, ready to go over to the Herald’s Rest. “Look, it’s been a really rough couple of months. I want to get trashed, and then maybe I might want to ravage you a little. Please don’t stand in my way - at least, not out of some sense of misplaced valour. You’re obviously welcome to object on any other possible grounds.”

Predictably, by this point, Cullen was fighting a blush. Given that he was already looking very handsome, in a black shirt that brought back memories of the dashing silhouette he cut in Halamshiral, it was almost enough to tempt Asha to skip the party entirely. Instead, she walked up behind him - feeling very pretty in her dress, after all the months she’d spent travelling in breeches - and placed a hand on his back, stroking a line up to his neck, revelling in the way he fought a tiny shudder. “Of course,” she murmured in his ear - standing on tiptoe to do so. “You are also welcome to get royally trashed, and ravage _me_ instead, if you feel so inclined.”

“I told my sister about you!” Cullen blurted, suddenly, startling her. He glanced at her. “In a letter. I sent Mia a letter. She said she’d quite like to meet you.”

“Oh,” Asha moved round to his front, trailing her hand still along his shoulder blades and watching him blush like no tomorrow. “Well. That’s nice…” It was, and she felt that warm fizzing feeling in her chest brim up almost to bursting. But at the same time... “Should I dare delve into the logic behind why you chose this _particular_ moment to bring it up?”

“Oh, fuck off.” he grumbled. She kissed him, and was still giggling when they finally made it downstairs into the tavern.

Varric had arranged a gathering to celebrate Wintersend a week late - Wicked Grace in The Herald’s Rest. Given that Asha had celebrated Wintersend with Cullen, Bull, Dorian, and Cole by roasting _three_ rabbits on the campfire rather than two, she was all for a night of cards and good liquor, somewhere _warm_. The novelty of pinning her hair for decoration rather than practicality, after the tedious routine of the last month, was not lost on her.

Unspoken, but silently acknowledged by every member of the Inquisition, was the ominous knowledge of what lay ahead of them . Asha and Cullen had just returned from a harrowing mission, and it would only be another month before all of them began their assault on the Arbor Wilds, Samson, and the Red Templar army. Everything seemed to be coming to a head with the inevitability of a tidal wave crashing onto shore. And apparently that prompted Varric to do what he did best - host some kind of quiet revel that was somehow revel enough to make everyone forget the outside world for an evening. 

“Glad you both could make it,” Varric grinned as they took their seats next to each other at the table closest to the tavern’s huge fireplace. He’d already bought a round - ale and some bottles of the _really_ old elven wine that had been there since before they moved in, seemingly for the nostalgia. He even seemed a little dressed up, and he wasn’t the only one. Cass, who was set wide legged and already two drinks deep, was wearing a brilliant royal purple shirt that Asha had never seen on her before, which did wonders for her already wonderful colouring. Asha cast Cullen a _significant_ look, causing the corner of his mouth to lift. 

“Solas not coming?” Asha asked, noting the mage’s absence from the table.

“Chuckles lives up to his name,” Varric replied with a shrug. 

“You could go to the library and ask him?” Cullen prompted, softly and carefully, in that very boyfriendly ‘I don’t mind you having male friends, even one that acts like a wanker around me’ tone of voice.

Asha snorted. Cullen looked confused, but Varric also grinned, in full understanding. “You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever played a round of cards with him, Curly.”

“His absence is bad and boring and _so very in character_ for him - but so very, very good for our purses, _vhenan’ara_ ,” Asha said, patting Cullen’s arm. 

“Ew,” Ellana offered as commentary, as she shoved her own chair back with a screech and took a seat at the opposite end of the table.

“Ew yourself,” Asha responded, leaning over the table. “...Did you get any of the good stuff?”

“You know it, sister mine,” Ellana said, rustling in the bag she had at her side to procure a heavy looking, dark, and very full bottle of Golden Scythe. She deposited it with a proud thunk onto the table.

“Through _honest means_ , this time,” murmured Blackwall, with a small smile that wasn’t quite hidden by his beard. Ellana shot him a wink, and then began wrestling the cork out. A heady wave of alcohol scented air, strong enough to sting the nose, flooded over the table.

“Oh, no,” said Cullen, when a glass with four fingers of liquor, the same buttery gold as his hair, was shoved in his direction.

“Oh _yes_ ,” Asha smirked, and downed hers (very ill advisedly) all in one go. 

By the time she’d stopped coughing, Josie was beginning to deal cards. Bull and Dorian were the last ones to take their seats and Cole sort of just… materialised. Asha knew he was more human these days, but it seemed like certain aspects of that were a little more fluid than others. She hoped the claim of lost telepathy was honest, however.

Although… she wasn’t sure Cole would need it, in certain cases. When the hands were dealt and Cullen examined his own on her right hand side, he frowned like someone had just insulted his filing system, or told him that a mabari had gotten into the paperwork. He let out a big sigh, and she fought the urge to roll her eyes. She’d foreseen this, of course - if the man’s facial expressions had been enough to _teach her how to play chess_ , then he was going to be colossally fucked in a game of Wicked Grace.

She decided to give him a fighting chance, and kicked his shin sharply under the table. It made him flinch and he glanced over at her. “What?”

She kept her face a serene mask, hoping he might, maybe, _potentially_ , get the message, “...nothing.”

“Dealer starts! Oooh… I’ll believe I’ll start at… three coppers? Do you think that’s too daring?” Josie asked, placing her hands daintily over her cards. “Maybe I’ll make it one… no! Boldness! Three it is!”

Asha smiled good naturedly, wondering who exactly Josephine thought she was fooling. Not only was she Antivan, she was also _rich_. When had a noblewoman - even the nicest, kindest of the bunch - ever sweated over three coppers?

Cullen moved to sip his liquor, and flashed her his (admittedly very bad) hand of cards - entirely accidentally. It was going to be a long night.

Asha decided to try and intervene on his behalf, distracting Varric through the time-honoured method of getting him to talk about himself. And then she hastily poured Cullen more Golden Scythe. At least he’d have an excuse when he proved to be absolutely shite at cards.

“ _You know all that pent up frustration I had, when it was fucking obvious that that man was in love with you, and everyone else but you knew it, clear as day?_ ” Ellana asked, as they went up to the bar on slightly wobbly legs to buy some wine. Although Cullen didn’t know, the Golden Scythe had been mainly for him, and they’d left him half the bottle. “ _I didn’t want to revisit that feeling, Ash. It was bad enough the first time round. How is it suddenly ten times worse? I feel like I’m having a stroke._ ”

“ _He’s very, very good at chess_ ,” Asha replied - her most valiant defence. 

“ _Josie is lying, Ash! She’s lying!_ ” 

“ _Yes, da’lathin, I am aware_.”

“ _And he’s worked with her for months! How does he now know this? It’s been five rounds. He’s losing all his gold!_ ”

“You know, I feel like there should be some kind of rule against speaking in elvhen,” Cullen said, as he came to stand next to them at the bar. He was still steady and his voice crisp and polite, but Asha was _absolutely certain_ she was getting him tipsy. His eyes were a little too dazed, and lingering just a little too long on certain aspects of her physique.

“Nothing’s stopping you from a bout of spontaneous Orlesian,” she pointed out to him.

“Only my pride.”

“You still have any of that left?” Ellana asked, bluntly.

“El!”

“What?” she said to Asha, and then cast a very pointed glance over to his significantly depleted stack of gold, and the size of Josie’s corresponding pile. 

Cullen followed her gaze. “You… make a fair point. But!” he said, with a wide, unearned and unabashedly confident smile, “I can still win it back! I’m not out of the running yet - I’ve figured out the Ambassador’s tells.”

_Oh, you poor man._ “Of course you have, Commander,” she said, with a reassuring pat on his shoulder, while El was a little less kind and merely snorted. “Just like I’ve been 'letting you' win at chess for months in order to make you feel _all manly_. You shouldn’t have given me that lucky coin of yours if you wanted to win. Do you want some wine?”

“Are you trying to get me drunk?” he teased.

“...‘Trying’?”

“I’m perfectly sober, love.”

“Sure you are. Why don’t you tell us another story about that anonymous templar recruit who flashed everyone? What was his name again… ‘Callum’? ‘Gullen’?”

Normally, such an accusation would’ve reduced him to a blushing mess. This time he simply gave her the kind of smile that reduced _her_ to a blushing mess, then winked, the _absolute bastard_. “Maybe later, if you ask very, _very_ nicely, Inquisitor,” he said, pressing a kiss to her cheek that lingered a little too long, until El made a standard ‘bleh’ sound. “Right now, I have a game to win.”

“Oh no,” Ellana sighed, as he walked back over to the table and downed the rest of his Golden Scythe without even a grimace, refilling his glass two seconds later. “What have you done?”

“I don’t know,” Asha said, rubbing at her cheek, which still felt very warm. “Possibly created a monster.”

“Aren’t you going to… stop him?”

“Gods, why would I?” Asha gave a grin that she knew was a little sappy, but she was glad he was having fun. This was what she’d _wanted_ to happen, after all those months of misery huddled together in the frigid fucking cold. “The man has to pick up at least one embarrassing story while he’s in the Inquisition, otherwise he’ll never get invited to the reunions. And if Josie’s the one collecting the money, you know it’ll be back in our coffers - possibly even the military budget - by the end of the week. What’s the worst that could happen?”

It was about then, of course, that Cullen - still talking with Josephine across the table, possibly about the weather - undid his top button and lifted his shirt over his head.

Both sisters paused the conversation, to blink several times over.

“What the-” Asha started forward.

“No, no, Ash, exactly as you said,” Ellana murmured, yanking Asha back to a standstill at the bar, and handing over a very full glass of red. Her sister’s eyes traced a very appreciative line from the swoop of Commander’s shoulder blades, down his spine to the taut lines of his waist and lower back. The expanse of skin was all looking very warm and gold in the firelit glow, and Asha couldn’t even blame her. “Just let it happen.”

Asha considered putting up more of a fight, but one sip of her wine told her it was _very_ pleasant, and she certainly couldn’t complain about the view.

They’d missed two games and she was three more cups deep when Cullen suddenly started working at his trousers, and Asha felt like she had to intervene. “Ah ah ahh, _vhenan’ara_ ,” she said, gently, placing a (very ill-advised) hand on his thigh as she sat back down next to him, and distracted him from his laces, “let’s leave something to the imagination.”

“I gave them my word, Inquisitor,” he told her. Very seriously, for someone performing a strip tease for his work colleagues. He was still not slurring, but the bottle of Golden Scythe was empty beside him. “At this point, it is a question of honour.”

She glared at the rest of the table, who all seemed thoroughly entertained. “Yes, but I’m sure they’ll understand-”

“Come on now, Flash,” Varric crowed. “I have intelligence to gather. Riviani specifically commissioned me.”

“It was… um… rather part of the deal, Inquisitor,” said Josephine, _the sly minx_ , the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the secret pervert - which was saying something, when you were sharing a table with the Iron Bull. “Given that he doesn’t… um… actually have any gold left?”

“Yes, but still. For the sake of the Inquisition’s reputation, maybe we shouldn’t force our Commander into a free show -”

“- Why, love?” he asked, eyes very wide and sincerely curious. “It’s not like I’ve got anything to be _embarrassed_ about. You know I’m very ‘well formed’.”

That _blinding_ display of humility earned a round of appreciative ‘oooohs’ from everyone at the table, and an “oh my goodness” from Josephine. Cassandra mostly just looked like she wanted to die, and yet something was compelling the Seeker to keep watching. 

“Well, now he _has_ to do it,” Dorian announced to the air.

Asha could tell she was fighting a losing battle. “You might want to move your hand, love,” Cullen murmured in her ear - thank the gods that remark still registered as needing some kind of discretion. As it was, every hair on her neck rose. They both, in tandem, looked down at the hand resting on his thigh, before he continued, “unless you want to give them more of a show than they bargained for.”

“I want you to remember this moment,” Asha said, as she hastily moved away, cheeks burning. “I want this to be a memory for you at some point, tomorrow morning. I tried to stop you. I really, really did. This story you’ll never live down? This was absolutely _your_ choice.”

Cullen shrugged. Cullen. _shrugging_. It was official, then - he was hammered. He smirked at her as he stood up in his chair, eyes bright. She tried to maintain eye contact and keep a straight face, but she couldn’t do it as he shoved down his trousers, to the shrieks and applause of his audience.

“You fucking idiot,” she said, her hands over her eyes and ears burning, as he sat back down. On his stool, which couldn’t have been comfortable - would he get splinters in sensitive places? She tried to drop his discarded shirt into his lap for some semblance of modesty, but he refused.

He leaned in, while Asha valiantly tried to look anywhere but _at him_. “Why are you the one blushing, love? It’s not like it’s anything you haven’t seen before.”

More ‘oohs’ from around the table. Proving to the Inquisitor that she was working with school children, because it wasn’t as if the two of them had moved in together _months_ ago. Asha contemplated the wisdom of opening a rift in the Herald’s Rest and losing all of the Inquisition’s finest in one fell swoop. In a level voice, she replied, “you know, it’s all a bit different when your _sister’s_ involved.”

“I’m not really complaining,” Ellana offered up with a smirk.

“Don’t worry, Flash, we’re all _very impressed_. With _both_ of you,” said Varric, and that was when she managed to remove her hands from her face, in order to glare at him. She knew she must look like a tomato.

“Well, I’m not,” said Bull, with his biggest, shit eating grin.

“Keep drinking,” Asha said, hurriedly shoving some wine in Cullen’s direction. When he looked at her, confused, she said, “at this point, all you have left of your dignity is running on bravado. You’re going to want to ride this out, and probably not sober up until quite a while after.”

“Look at how much she loves me,” Cullen announced, while naked, to the entire table, with a wild gesture of his hands. “Honestly, nothing but honeyed words from my Inquisitor.”

Asha sighed, and downed her own wine with haste.

“Cullen. Cullen, love. _Vhenan’ara_.” Asha said, through gritted teeth, “please, _please_ just hold onto the throw.”

“Anything for you,” he replied muzzily, not slurred but tired and warm and gruff, and then he dropped an open-mouthed and messy kiss onto her jawline, where her neck strained. Which would’ve been very romantic, had it not meant that he leaned all his weight onto her like a very generous gift. She couldn’t hold him up, and it sent her stumbling into the castle wall, cursing as she only just managed to keep them both upright. Her temple clipped the stone, and she rubbed the spot with what she hoped remained good-natured annoyance.

After all those months of him very gallantly escorting her places when tipsy, Asha had hoped to return the favour. Of course, the problem was that, with all his muscle and height, Cullen had several stone on her. She was strong, but she was also bound by mortal constraints. When Cass started her on weights training, maybe she should’ve just tasked the Inquisitor with acting like a crutch for the Commander.

Cullen was still naked. Josephine had refused to give him his clothes back, because Josie was quite drunk, and also secretly evil. With Sera also out cold, Asha had nipped upstairs and stolen a throw from her room. It was bright pink and gold. Cullen had it slung round his hips like a towel, and that was apparently what counted for modesty, as they struggled back towards Asha’s quarters.

As she shoved them up the stairs and across the throne room, hugging the wall and panting, she noticed his hand was slipping again, and the blanket getting dangerously low, displaying a deep vee of muscle and also the small, silvered scar on his hip, that she’d kissed more than once in the past. “Cullen,” she barked, “ _blanket_.”

“Mmm?” he looked down, then tightened his grip, “sorry.”

“Who would’ve thought _you_ were the Inquisition’s exhibitionist?” she teased, as they finally made it past a very scandalised guard, a Dagna who was looking like she suddenly didn’t regret working late, and one final table that Cullen accidentally barged her into, before reaching the door to her rooms. 

“Bull walks around shirtless. You skinny dip… literally _anywhere_.”

“Yes, and now you’re never going to be able to tease either of us about that, ever again.” Asha replied. “And you had _so little_ ammunition to begin with!” 

She shoulder barged the door open, and manoeuvred him through. As it slammed shut behind them, he slumped against her and she slumped against the wall, exhausted. The three seconds to catch her breath was all it took, for her to realise that they were suddenly alone, Cullen was still incredibly naked, and that was no longer an embarrassing fact but a very, very visceral one.

She glanced up at his face in the shadow, and saw the moment when he realised it, too. Between one breath and the next, she was suddenly slammed up against the wall. She squeaked as he captured her mouth with his, but quickly reciprocated, melting against him. The wine and the feel of his bare skin under her fingers as she traced up his chest and slung an arm around his neck made her feel reckless. After so many weeks of checking her every action, it felt good to be a little drunk and a little mindless. Cullen seemed to agree, tasting her mouth like he’d been starved of her for days. He threaded both his hands deep into her hair and tugged her close, loosening the decorative plaits and snagging in her curls as he cupped the back of her skull and twisted her upwards.

Wait. He was using both hands.

He’d lost the blanket.

As her brain connected the dots, he suddenly picked her up, slinging her into a bridal carry. She wanted to say something, about how this might be ill-advised when he could barely stand upright, but then his mouth was on hers again, and he was walking blindly forward, up the stairs, with a confidence she decided to trust. Her hands ghosted his shoulders, running across old scars, as she bit his lip before their mouths broke apart. He groaned and buried his face in her hair, breathing deep as her lips rasped against stubble to kiss his ear, kiss his jaw, kiss his -

\- In hindsight, it had probably not been the safest of decisions.

Cullen - drunk out of his mind, and having some very good justification for not looking where he was going - missed the top step.

The two of them tumbled and went sprawling across the floor of her quarters. Asha rolled a couple of paces, coming to a stop when she clipped a chair. She knew it would probably bruise, but when cushioned inside a fog of drink, the glancing blow didn’t really seem to hurt that much at all. She raised her head, to see Cullen cursing at scraped shins and knees while he pulled himself up. They met each others’ eyes, horrified for a quick second, before they both dissolved into laughter.

“Oh my gods… are you…” she took a big whooping breath, then shuffled across the floor on her ass, wincing at a sore spot on her hip from where she’d fell. She ran a hand through his hairline and examined his face for injuries, fighting giggles, “Did you hurt,” she laughed again, struggling to finish the sentence as she thought of all the directions it could go in given their current messy arrangement of very bare, very exposed limbs and… other body parts, “ _anything?_ I can’t believe… that was the _stupidest_ -”

Her voice died out as she rubbed a thumb across his eyebrow, because she was suddenly aware of how he was looking at her, eyes soft and dark. He wasn’t laughing anymore, but he was smiling, forehead unlined, for one of those rare moments when he didn’t seem to have a care in the world. 

They sat next to each other on the floor, in silence, and her hand came to rest on his chest, where his heart was still thundering. From the liquor, desire, or adrenaline of the fall, she didn’t know.

“Are you sure you’re ok?” she asked, voice much quieter now.

He placed his hand over hers on his chest. The beat of his heart grew stronger under the pressure, with the added harmony of his pulse. “It’s yours, you know,” he said and she began to remember he was hammered. “I can no longer imagine anyone else ever laying claim to it.”

“That’s lovely. You’re drunk.”

He reached out with his other hand, and tucked a curl behind her ear. “Doesn’t make it less true.”

“You’re also naked.”

“Well,” he quirked an eyebrow, “surely, that just helps my case?”

She smiled, “maybe a little.”

He took her hand and laid a slow kiss against the heel of her palm, eyes closing almost regretfully. “I don’t deserve you.”

“You deserve me,” she told him softly.

“No, don’t misunderstand me,” he said, his normal serious demeanour made all the more earnest by drink. “It’s ok that I’m not worthy yet. I want to _earn_ you.”

“That makes me sound like a prize to be won.”

“No. More like a goal to be strived for,” he held her gaze, and then sounded out, in frankly shockingly accented elvhen, “ _vhenan’ara_.”

Asha let out a little groan at the awful pronunciation, but buried her face in the crook of his shoulder anyway, arms looping around him where they now sat on the cold flagstones. She kissed the spot under his ear, he shuddered, and his arm clamped around her waist, tugging her closer until they became tangled. The world shifted, and suddenly she was on the floor with him above her, pinning her in and down into the floor. She was still fully clothed, and for some reason that made her feel more flustered than the fact he was not. At least if she was naked, she would’ve been able to explain the way her body felt.

“ _Ar lath ma,_ ” he breathed. And rather than make fun of him for it, or point out that he’d nearly said ‘I _once loved_ you’, due to some falters in his intonation, she simply pulled his mouth down to hers and kissed him.

“We’ll get bruises,” she whispered, a little while later, when her dress was discarded and they still hadn’t moved to the bed.

“These are the kind of bruises you get when you’re drunk,” he murmured back, and she could feel him smiling from where his mouth ghosted across her shoulder, then lower.

“Cullen Rutherford!” she laughed, delighted, “ _you dark horse!_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go! A fluff chapter! I think, with the run of chapters we've been having, and the state of the world in general, we've all earned it :D
> 
> Debating on whether or not to post another chapter this week because this seems like a nice non-cliffhanger place to pause. I am planning to post over my Christmas break but probably not on a schedule. So we'll see, I guess! Hope everyone is well xxx


	83. Chapter Eighty-Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> March on the Arbor Wilds

The next few weeks were, weirdly, some of the best days of Asha’s life.

Preparations for the Arbor Wilds were frenzied and urgent. Leliana’s ravens reported no news of Red Templar movements _en masse_ , but everyone knew it was a matter of getting to Mythal's temple first, without that resulting in them being surrounded and cornered in a place that was likely to try and kill them without any Red Templar input. They planned to move before the beginning of Eluviesta.

But at the same time, there was also only so much a person could do in the way of frantic predictions, when you weren’t actually in the thick of the fight, seeing how each decision played out. They were still guessing at what engaging Samson’s forces would even look like, especially as they retook Sahrnia and began to properly choke off the armies lyrium supple. So instead, Asha found herself mostly immersed in research - pouring over ancient documents and records of her patron goddess, her fabled temple, and the eluvian. Human records were often useless and at points outright offensive, but it was the kind of work she could fall into for hours. It would’ve been the kind of project she loved as the First, even before she could read. 

And when she wasn’t reading, she was training, refining her practice as a Knight Enchanter and revelling in the way that these days, she felt nearly _invulnerable_. She also worked alongside Cullen on the thawing training ground, dedicating the majority of each day to getting their army ready - or rather, adding some finishing touches, given that their army was now battle-hardened and several thousand strong. It was back to play-fighting templars, and now that the two of them had encountered the brutal reality, they both had millions of thoughts on new potential strategies. They spent hours demonstrating techniques and strategies as a well-honed team.

Each night, they would both blindly eat supper with their friends, ravenous and exhausted after a day of exertion, and then collapse into bed together. Sometimes, it was sexy. Other times, they were both simply too stiff to move, and would let the candles burn down and fizzle to fingertip tall stubs, rather than reaching even an inch to extinguish them. These nights, they would arrange themselves around each others’ bruises, drag up the covers, and then talk until their strained muscles softened and unconsciousness claimed them. Soon, there were no gaps of knowledge left in either of their lives. Asha knew about Cullen's favourite books; about his siblings; his mother and his father, the holidays his family had taken when he was a child. His mentor, still living in a Fereldan manor not claimed by the Blight. The friends he’d made at school, and lost at Kinloch. He even told her about what it was like to work with Meredith, as her sword slowly drove her mad. How he’d met Cassandra, in the aftermath of Kirkwall, and how their friendship had developed throughout all the dull, excruciating months of trying to perform admin while near blind with lyrium withdrawal.

Before _she’d_ arrived, he said, murmuring in the dark while tracing a slow lazy circle over her shoulder with one finger. Like he considered it a landmark event in the history of his life. A before, and an after.

She told him about what it was like to grow up in a clan, about the expectations placed on the First, about what it would’ve meant to become a Keeper one day. A more modest destiny than a Andraste’s Herald, but not by far. She told him her favourite myths, and patiently waited when he insisted on learning _elvhen_ words and repeated the sentences until his pronunciation was as close as he could get.

“Where would you be living now?” he asked, one evening. “If none of this had happened.”

“...‘None of this’?” she murmured. “How far back are we talking?”

“...Before you lost your clan.”

“Then I’d still be in the same place, _vhenan’ara_ ,” she stretched out against him with a sigh. “The Planasene. The Waking Sea in summer.”

“You didn’t want to travel further?”

“We sometimes went to Starkhaven,” she shrugged. “Pretty landscape, but so _boggy_. You went in winter, you forgot what dry socks felt like. You went summer, your shoes would still stink. Honestly, for all the Dalish talk about being nomadic, we still have a _home_. The places that are familiar. The places you want to return to. We only travel once we're forced to leave them.”

She glanced over at him, seeing his profile in candlelit relief as he stared at the ceiling. “What about you?”

Cullen frowned. “I’m pretty sure if I didn’t have the Inquisition, I’d be dead.”

“That’s no fun,” Asha chided, after a second of silence. “Ok, so what about if things stopped after Kinloch? What if you’d decided on quitting the Order then, rather than recovering from your blood magic demon trauma by going to blood magic demon central?”

Although it had been a particularly grim day of drilling new soldiers, Cullen managed to move enough to cast her an unimpressed glance. But he sighed, considering the question. “...I guess I would’ve gone south. Gone home. Lived wherever my family was. Gotten a house nearby. A job. Settled.”

“We never would’ve met,” murmured Asha, pressing her cheek against his chest. The Southern Reach was a place she'd never even though of visiting - gods, she was sort of in Ferelden under duress, if you thought about it. He would’ve been thousands of miles away from her, in some _shem_ town.

“No,” he said, quietly, “we wouldn’t.”

Asha fell silent, trying to imagine it. Neither life sounded _bad_ \- in fact, they both sounded quite pleasant. Asha thought they would both have been very happy: her living and ruling Lavellan, him with his modest holding nearby the people he loved. Probably with a pet dog, probably with another woman who took one look at his face and made the only sensible choice. That world would’ve been very, very easy, and filled with its own happinesses. 

But she found that she… _very much did not want it_.

And although Asha would never bring herself to be grateful for tranquility - because no one could thank the world for their violation and somehow call it ‘character building’ - it was one of the first moments where she could look back on her life, and the place she’d ended up in, without resentment.

The Arbor Wilds were so overwhelmingly gorgeous, that Asha forgot to be afraid.

The first night they camped at the edge of the woodlands, it all felt like walking through a dream. It had to feel dreamlike, otherwise Asha would have to admit that she was leading an army of Chantry warriors onto ground even her own people hadn’t touched in centuries. On the outskirts of the forest, there had been small stone shrines tucked into the gigantic roots of the trees - some new, others ancient and weathered. There were scatterings of offerings, from tiny hand-carved wooden dragons, to seashells honouring the goddess’ birthplace and snake skins honouring Asha’s favourite myth. These shrines only lasted for the first half mile or so - the furthest the Dalish dare venture without risking whatever consequences came from stepping on Mythal’s sacred ground. As the Inquisition began to leave these safer spaces and carve their path even deeper into the jungle, the already huge trees grew bigger and bigger. 

Dusk approached, and Asha dismounted from Buttons with her eyes pinned on the verdant canopy overhead. The soil was so rich she could smell it on the air, and with so much overgrown, untouched forest, it was easy to believe this might truly be the heart of the world. Not that she’d say such a thing surrounded by Andrastians. And if she said it to Solas, he’d probably just scoff. 

When she shook herself out of her daydream, she saw Ellana watching her from her own mount, no doubt reading every emotion that crossed her face. 

“...Deshanna would’ve loved it here,” her sister said, putting Asha's every feeling into words, and Asha promptly burst into tears. 

“I need to take a minute. Alone.” she told Cullen later, after they’d had a brief war meeting discussion to review their planned course through the jungle. 

He took one look at her and nodded, “don’t go far.”

Normally that kind of pronouncement would have her rolling her eyes but there were, admittedly, a lot of things that could eat her in this jungle. Forget templars - Asha still sometimes had nightmares about bears. So she toed the outskirts of the camp, using the light of her anchor as a guide as the dark closed in around them. She felt like she should meditate, or something, because that’s what Deshanna would’ve done… but she was past that now, wasn’t she? 

Instead she watched the motes of fireflies dance through the trees, and also watched her soldiers she now knew the names of carry out routine tasks. It felt strangely peaceful, in its own right. Safe. She stopped in a dark recess between two of the huge trees, alone - though the sounds of the Inquisition could be heard in the distance. It was like there was a strange doubling of both her life as a dedicate to Mythal, and whatever she was now. Homeless and clanless, and yet somehow neither.

“How does it feel, being here?” came a voice from the darkness. Asha would’ve sworn or cursed or jumped out of her skin, had she not already known Solas was there. He’d been following her for just under ten minutes now.

“Like the absolute height of blasphemy. As you well know,” she replied. She turned and watched him as he approached, before sitting down on one of the exposed knotted roots of the giant trees above them.

“Surely it is better that we reach this eluvian first, before Samson and his forces?” her friend observed, blandly, as he took a seat next to her.

“I know what the Inquisition is, Solas,” Asha said, not letting herself be goaded by the impassive quality of his voice. “I’m still leading the Chantry towards the sanctuary of my goddess and hoping it comes out the other side in one piece.”

“You do not trust the people around you?”

“I didn’t say that. You _know_ I didn’t say that.”

He softened his expression, as if conceding. “They know this is important to you. They will likely honour your wishes in this, if nothing else.”

“But whatever we encounter, they won’t understand it,” she sighed. “Even _I_ don’t understand it, fully, and I wear Her markings on my skin. Even if it wasn’t the Inquisition, _anyone_ finding this place we seek out would scare me. There must be a reason why it has stayed untouched for millennia - and I barely trust myself to honour it. The only way we _could_ honour it is to stay away as well, and we can’t do that.”

She looked up at the dark canopy above them, “I’m scared that whatever we do, it will be irreversible.”

Solas cleared his throat. In the light of the anchor, she saw his mouth twitch, like he was fighting a smirk. The bastard... was he... _laughing_ at her?

As Asha narrowed her eyes at him he sighed, looking apologetic. “There was a time when all of Arlathan could’ve fallen forgotten and untouched into history, _lethallan_ ,” he explained, “your people, the Dalish, decided not to let it be buried and preserved, perfect in its entirety. Instead they chose to excavate and unearth what they could, for better or worse.”

“I know which one you think it is,” she grumbled.

“They have transformed Arlathan many times over, so forgive me my levity. It simply made me smile to see such caution in you, given the circumstances. The Dalish have always been the ones to scour the ruins and pick them clean. I thought you would be... curious.”

“Of course I’m fucking curious!” she blurted. “I’ll be getting closer to my goddess than anyone, alive or dead! But it’s also some kind of _murder temple_ , Solas! I’m not stupid!”

“No.” he said, softly. “And you never have been.”

“No, I haven’t,” Asha replied. “So you already know I don’t take any of this lightly. I’ll try my best to protect whatever we find at our destination, but I’m not… I’m not perfect! I can be as well intentioned as I like, I’m still probably going to fuck it up somehow. I don’t think I’d trust anyone who was big-headed enough to think they know how to honour the Evanuris flawlessly.”

“What did these gods do in your lifetime, to ever earn your loyalty?” he sighed to the air.

Asha blinked at him, shocked into silence. Solas also had the good grace to look surprised, as if he hadn’t meant to voice those words aloud. He looked over at her, clearly expecting to immediately be verbally or physically assaulted for his troubles.

“...There’s a lot of things I could say,” she said, quietly. “And none of them you’d believe." 

Solas was quiet again, like he was hesitating. And then he said something she wasn't expecting: "But... I can listen."

Asha sighed, "I know you think I'm just a product of my upbringing. That I honour the gods simply because I love my family and my clan, and that is what we’ve always done.”

She expected him to interject immediately, but in a rare, _rare_ moment, Solas stayed silent. He was watching her face, and maybe it was a trick of the light, with only the anchor for illumination, but his eyes seemed dark and hungry enough to swallow her whole. 

“Being a Keeper, that destiny meant something to me," she continued. "I felt responsible. I felt… _chosen_. You could write such things off as selfishness, I suppose. My magic, that can be explained by my connection to the Fade. Anything I feel about my relationship to the world when I perform magic - the power I feel, the connection... If I call it a gift from the gods, you can easily disprove that, too. The orb, and my being rescued, somehow, from tranquility… well, you can veil it in the terms of ‘anomalies’ and call it blind luck, but the fact is I was _saved_. Whether by the whims of the universe, or from the deliberate care of a god who values me... or maybe we just can see me as the collateral damage of some greater force scheming in a way I can never hope to understand… _how was it in any way unplanned?_ How could I ever see this… this impossibility as anything other than salvation, Solas? An elvhen artefact… in a _Chantry ruin_. Anyone could've walked in on Justinia dying. There must have been some kind of intervention.” 

He was still silent. He remained so.

“And of course, I know what you’re thinking,” Asha continued, filling in his side of the conversation for him. “‘It’s all just circumstantial, and I’m the one who gives it meaning, through a bunch of bastardised, half-remembered fairy tales. Well… why the fuck not? Maybe I _like_ giving my life a little meaning. The Chantry probably slipped and misremembered a few details about Andraste, too, and their rule over my people and my body as a mage is one of absolute law. Maybe the elvhenan could do with a little belief, now and then, to balance the scale. If you think that all I believe is a bunch of pretty lies to make myself feel better, then fuck it! Why is that a bad thing? A millennia of culture doesn’t suddenly become worthless, just because you say so. My ‘pretty lies’ gave my mentor the wisdom I revered her for. They married my parents on the solstice. They named my sister, and they gave my clan a reason to care for one another and last for countless generations. It made gave Lavellan a legacy older than half the noble houses in Thedas. Those lies give my life purpose, and something to strive for. They’re _true_. To me.”

“But... if you could know,” he said, suddenly, as if he’d remembered he was in a conversation, not just listening to an impassioned monologue. “If you could know the truth - the truth behind everything - would you want to?”

She glanced over at him slantwise, with a look of _someone is getting a bit ahead of themselves_. He quickly glanced away, a little… bashful, almost, as if he'd made a mistake. “It’s a thought experiment, _lethallan_ ,” he hastily clarified, “I would never claim _outright_ to know the history of our people… But who knows what we may encounter in Mythal’s temple.”

“Of course I’d want to know,” Asha said, “can you imagine the bragging rights I’d have, as a Keeper?”

“ _Lethallan_...”

“Of course I would, Solas.” she repeated, her voice more serious this time. “Anyone would. But you’re the one who is constantly telling me that things never exist as just one thing. I think the Dalish are stronger than you give them credit for. We took something and made it our own. It’s _ours_. We may rely on what came before, but there are many, many generations between us and the _elvhenan_ , these days. Maybe it’s not really _about_ them, anymore.”

Solas stared at her for a long time after that, but she was so used to it that she just cockily raised an eyebrow and waited for whatever thought he was trying to form. He looked extremely conflicted. He was fighting the urge to say something, and from the look in his eyes, it was probably something she would find extremely offensive. 

Asha could pinpoint the exact moment his cowardice overcame him, and he chose not to say it.

“Then you clearly have nothing to fear from our destination, _lethallan_ ,” he said finally, an inadequate sentence for the long silence that had preceded it. 

“Oh, yooou fucker. It’s still a _murder temple_ , run by a goddess who can _turn into a dragon_ , Solas,” she said, affectionate frustration plain in her voice. “We can philosophise about the _elvhenan_ on this log until the halla come home. I’m still scared we’re going to piss off something big and sentient by trampling a bunch of soldiers across hallowed ground.”

He gave her a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Another valid point.”

“Maybe, instead of uncovering an ancient truth long forgotten, I should focus on keeping us all alive,” Asha joked. “All my fears are a little less… existential than yours, I think. Or they are now. So... thanks, I guess?” 

“I didn’t come here to give you advice-”

“Of course you did,” she teased. “That’s what you’re here for - _always_ here for. I can’t walk off in an ancient forest of elvhenan and not expect to encounter you, really. It's practically your natural habitat. But,” she stood up, stretched out, “I should head back.”

Solas looked down at the ground, scuffing a foot through the dirt. “No doubt you are missed,” he said, in a deliberately opaque tone that was, frankly, crystal clear. A name hung on the air between them, unspoken.

“I find that these days, yes, I am,” she said, lightly, beginning to walk away before anything about the situation shifted too far into dangerous territory.

“Asha,” she paused and looked back at him when he said her name. “Your _vallaslin_...”

She cocked her head, confused. “What about it?”

Solas hesitated, then said, “...Your design is old. Older than Ellana’s, I believe. Perhaps being a dedicate of Mythal will mean something, in the temple,” Solas said. “It would be... beneficial to make your allegiance visible, I think.”

Asha squinted at him. With the anchor now a distance away, he was just a dark shape against the night. Face was entirely in shadow, expression unreadable. 

It was such a bizarre observation for him to make, because she was _a mage_. She barely even wore a cloak hood on the battlefield, never mind a helmet or one of those hideous cowls that seemed to be the only thing in the Circles Vivienne _wouldn’t_ defend. Her hair was always scraped back with military practicality… when they were _on military campaign_. 

“Oh, well,” she replied, awkwardly. “That’s convenient, given that I left all my foundation in Skyhold. And I _so_ wanted to meet Samson looking my best.”

“I… it was a foolish thing to say,” the shadow that was Solas replied. Asha still couldn’t make out his expression, but from the tone of his voice, his frustration seemed sincere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone!! I hope you enjoyed the chapter. 
> 
> I'm not sure what more I'll be posting of Eye of the Storm this year (although I do have a new Alistair/warden fic, [The Fortress of Highever](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28339035/chapters/69431430), that I am currently posting alongside this). So I just wanted to say to everyone, in case I miss you, Happy New Year! 2020 has been, obviously, awful. I got into fanfic as a way with coping with the pandemic, and I never expected a hyperfixation to be quite this rewarding (or last quite this long). Thank you to everyone who's read my stupid amount of words, kudosed and commented! There were genuinely points this year where you were the reason I got out of bed. Fanfic has saved my mental health during this hellscape of a year, so thank you!! xx
> 
> Anyway, soppy messages aside, I'll probably resume standard posting once my Christmas brain has recovered. Everyone stay safe!


	84. Chapter Eighty-Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What Pride Had Wrought, part 1

It was a late morning in Eluviesta when the race for Mythal’s temple began. 

They’d penetrated deep into the Wilds. The last week had been marked by skirmishes with Red Templar marauders they encountered on the way, as everyone tried to the strike to the heart of the grove. The Inquisition hadn’t yet found their destination - but judging by the fact that most of Samson’s forces were still scattered in camps of twenty or so individuals, neither had they. 

Asha had asked Solas if he thought some kind of cloaking magic was at work. “I simply think the maps are inaccurate, _lethallan_ ,” he told her. “I don’t think the cartographers ever made it this far, to gain any sense of distance.”

But they couldn’t risk travelling too far into the jungle blind and then simply finding themselves surrounded by all of Corypheus’ armies. So the Inquisition set up an outpost, and waited. 

They waited for two days, and Asha was pretty certain her hand didn’t leave her sword hilt once the entire time. It was certainly resting there, when both Cullen and Cassandra burst into the logistics tent and the Seeker announced: “It’s time. Samson’s forces are on the move. Leliana’s scouts say the Elder One has been spotted to the North.”

Asha clambered out of her seat, looking immediately to Cullen. “Do you have it?”

Cullen paused, conflicted for a second. Then he nodded, and fled back the way he’d came. 

Asha stepped out of the tent. Already people were assembling, according to plans they’d been drilled in for weeks. Cullen and Rylen were leading the Inquisition’s army, Vivienne and Fiona were commanding the mages. Ellana, to Asha’s dismay, was one of Leliana’s runners between the various battalions. While passing communications amongst the Inquisition's factions, it was likely she would stay out the line of fire… but not guaranteed. 

As with Adamant, Asha was leading a splinter group that would move independently of the wider army and infiltrate while the majority of Samson’s forces were occupied. Morrigan was with her, as was Solas, Cole, Cassandra, Bull, and Dorian.

“Do we finally know where the temple is?” Asha asked Cass as her group began to gather.

Cass frowned. “Two of Leliana’s scouts did not return last night. We correlated their positions - they were both heading north-west.”

“They’re dead?”

“...We think so. Possibly Samson’s forces are already there?”

Solas appeared by Asha’s shoulder, seemingly from thin air. “The Veil,” he intoned, pointing north west as Cassandra had just said, “its weave seems thinner... towards that direction.”

Asha shrugged - that was better than nothing, though she wondered why he didn’t mention it earlier. “Good enough for me!” 

“Inquisitor,” Cullen ran up, a leather pack in his hands. Asha held her hand out, and after a moment’s hesitation, he handed it over. The heft was similar to the weight of armour - heavy, but not insurmountable.

“Is this the rune?” she asked, but she already was opening the pack even as the question left her mouth. Inside the bag was a piece of metal the size of a dinner plate, glowing faintly like a simmering coal in a dying fire. She saw Cullen tense as she leaned forward to examine it - his templar mindset no doubt meant he was worried that the experimental magic might malfunction or break at any moment. Asha was wearing her gloves, but she swore she could feel the heat of it through the leather. She hastily shoved it back into the pack and began tugging it around her waist, buckling the ties like a belt around her middle.

Cullen looked at her. “You just need to get close, to use it,” he said, as if she hadn’t also been in the room when receiving these same instructions. “Dagna said it’s proximity should act like a corrupted version of a templar’s purge - the armour _should_ fail.”

“Let’s hope it does,” she said, fastening the final buckle in place. She glanced up at him, and was surprised to find her smile was genuine as she said, “maybe we’ll even get both of them.”

“Let’s set the bar a little lower than that,” he said, in his usual dower manner, “and then congratulate herself if we overachieve. I’ll settle for none of us dying.”

“And claiming the temple.”

“...I’d rather you just come back safe.”

Sera, who was rallying with Ellana and Leliana and the other scouts, made a gagging motion behind the Commander’s back. Asha thought she heard Solas cough, to hide a chuckle.

But... fuck ‘em. She and Cullen didn’t have time to find a quiet corner, so it looked like public vulnerability was the only way forward if she wanted a chance to say goodbye. “I’m not the one on the frontline,” she told him, her voice turning serious. “ _You’re_ the one who should be careful.”

“The last time we carried out this kind of plan, you launched yourself bodily into the Fade.”

She put one finger up to query. “ _Accidentally._ ”

“That... does not make it better. Nor does it fill a man with confidence.”

“I came out the other side? In one piece?” she pointed out. “Surely, we wouldn’t keep making these kinds of plans if they didn’t work. I must be doing something right.”

“Just… try to have some self preservation? For me?”

“Who needs self-preservation?” she grinned, and put a thumb under her collar to hook out a silver chain that now rested on her throat under her clothes. Dangling from the end of it was his silver coin - she’d had Harrit set it in a mould of warm summerstone on one of the many days Dagna was down in the Undercroft working on (and liberally swearing at) the red lyrium rune. “I’ve got luck.”

Cullen paused, and his mouth quirked into a smile at the sight of it. But that brief, bashful joy flitted across his face and disappeared, like the sun peeking its way through a cloudy sky. He was back to being serious in under two seconds. “You know, I’d still rather you put stock in caution.”

“Aww, love you too, _vhenan’ara_ ,” she teased. It was so typical of Cullen to give her a lucky coin as protection, and then start pessimistically dismissing luck the moment it began to matter. “Look at you trying to sweet talk me. How embarrassing - people are watching!”

Cullen closed his eyes for a second, clearly sending a prayer to Andraste. When he opened them again, he said, “Asha, you know you should-”

But then Asha spotted the dark-haired shape of Rylen approaching from the edge of camp. They had no more time. In full view of everyone, she darted two steps forward, grabbed two fistfuls of Cullen’s fur monstrosity where it draped over his armour, and tugged him forward, smashing her lips against his. 

There was the scrape of three-day old stubble, before his words were swallowed, open-mouthed, his hands buried deep in her hair, and their tongues clashed. She was surprised to find that the beginnings of adrenaline and first notes of fear drumming through her system were not enough to extinguish desire entirely. Asha wasn’t really kissing him to feel anything, but she wanted to sear this memory into both their minds and seal their parting moments. The kiss held enough heat and desperation to do so, like a forceful stamp on half molten wax. Her body reacted the way it always did to his presence.

She didn’t think it had gone on that long, but then Cassandra was clearing her throat and Rylen was suddenly on Cullen’s right-hand side, rocking on his heels with an expression that spoke volumes. Asha broke away, stepping back and swiping the back of her anchored hand across her mouth. 

For a second, the professional veneer of Cullen as Commander simply failed him - his eyes were dark and locked on her, his lips were red and marred, though Asha didn’t remember using teeth. Then, he too seemed to remember where he was, and who he was with - or rather the number of people that he was _also with_ , who were not her. His face became serious and clouded once more, which made the next words out of his mouth all the more absurd.

“I love you, Ashatarsylnin Lavellan,” he said (in his war room voice). “I really will not forgive you, _or myself_ , if you die.”

The rune pressed into her back as her party frantically tunnelled through the undergrowth.

They’d just avoided another roving band of templars. Cullen and Vivienne’s forces had preceded them by an hour, hoping to engage and clear out a swathe of the opposing forces before the Inquisitor entered the field. But Asha had no idea if that was working out in their favour. This battle wasn’t like Adamant. It wasn’t fought on easy, legible lines, or carved into neat sections like slices of cake. Everyone was just tumbling blindly through the forest, Asha had no real clue as to their direction, and they were just as likely to run into a clump of Inquisition soldiers as Red Templars. Only Leliana’s runners, who’d spent the past two days scouting the territory, seemed to know what they were doing. Asha was trusting Morrigan and Solas to lead them, and the sounds of fighting all around were the only evidence she had that they were still on track.

“My texts mentioned a river. T’was thought to be Mythal’s way of cleansing the land!” Morrigan threw over her shoulder, as they sprinted. As she said it, they burst out of the tree line and onto a wide, shallow riverbank with a pebbled shore. Ahead was the ruined remnants of a half a bridge, stones crumbling and toppled into the water. The first signs of civilisation, even if it was long-dead, ever since they’d entered the Wilds. They _were_ going the right way.

Asha had a second to gaze in awe at what was probably the oldest artefact of her culture she’d ever seen. For someone who’d hated camping in ruins, even she had to admit she felt something… even if it was just a bridge.

Then, “To the west,” Solas barked, and they were running once more.

Their journey was a blur for Asha. Breathless and frenzied and… you know what, sodden, from being constantly pushed into rivers by Red Templars twice her size. She spent most of her time hoping the Inquisitor wasn’t about to end her entry in the history books by drowning in two feet of brackish water, on her goddess’ doorstep. 

They must have run two miles downstream, and left about thirty slaughtered templars in their wake, when she heard the shouting, and this time recognised the voice.

“Cullen,” she breathed. Solas cast a worried glance over his shoulder.

She was running ahead of the group before he had a chance to stop her.

It turned out it was the right direction, anyway. As Asha threw herself off another half-destroyed bridge with a fade step, she looked up from her landing place to see that the stonework in this new clearing wasn’t… 

_Wasn’t ruins_. 

A large - impossibly large, and entirely intact - building rose up above the treeline. Dark vines climbed the walls, and a carved statue of a dragon guarded the entrance. Heart in her mouth, Asha noticed that even the statues of Fen’Harel, so often decimated or vandalised in temples in the outside world, were untouched. 

Somehow, her Commander and his forces had found Mythal’s temple. And they were protecting the entrance for her arrival. His troop had a shield wall up, fighting to keep the Red Templars from ascending the stairs. But there were so many Red Templars, and among them she thought she spotted another recognisable figure - notable because they were not rock, and also still had hair. They didn’t even glow like the rest. 

_Samson._ And... maybe it was a forced perspective but wasn’t that-

“Fuck me,” Asha said. Eloquently. Cullen was facing off against fucking _Corypheus_. She was the only person amongst the Inquisition to have even _seen_ the Elder One in the (decaying) flesh, and now her boyfriend was trying to stop him from reaching his destination, like a reformed thug guarding a tavern door.

There was only one thing for it. Asha summoned Valour with a cry, and with another fade step, she launched herself at the back of the nearest behemoth.

As she plunged the blade with a scorching shower of sparks through the back of its neck, puncturing up and through what would’ve once been its skull, she heard Corypheus’ deep voice from somewhere outside of her vision: “You! Pretender!”

“That’s me, bitch!” she hollered back. The behemoth fell forward, lifeless, and she jumped from its back and into the fray.

As her party hit the frenzy of templars in the clearing, Asha carved her way through knights and shadows, frantically trying to plan ahead. Could she use the rune on Samson here? Or would it be even better to shove it at Corypheus, and see what it did to his various lyrium appendages? 

It was all theoretical panic, anyway. Every time Asha tried to get herself closer to Corypheus, another templar would simply step in her way, and even now, she would get a new thrill of fear alongside her frustration. At one point she heard a new voice - one that she guessed belonged to Raleigh Samson - yell, “get us to the door!” When she glanced over her shoulder, she saw that while her force had begun to thin out the templars at the edge of the clearing, Corypheus wasn’t seeing it as much of a distraction. He was simply using Samson’s army as fodder. Samson and his main guard were all closer to the temple entrance. 

Cullen and his men were still defending it. There was so much distance between Asha and him.

“You will not prevail!” cried Cullen, voice rising above the clang of metal. Asha had just enough time to think _what a stupidly Cullen thing to say_ , before there was a flash in the corner of her vision. 

And she saw him fall.

She didn’t know who or what had done it. Magic? A lyrium blade? The other men under his command were shouting, and Asha was shouting too. There wasn’t time to think or cry or panic: she simply ducked under the guard of a behemoth, and sprinted forward. But then another templar was blocking her path, _again_ , and _there wasn’t time_. So with a grunt of effort and a frigid, frantic breath, she fade-stepped once more, running full pelt through the half world of the Veil. 

Ice crystallised up her arms as she reached the body. Samson was standing over it, examining the face to see who exactly had fallen, and grinning with delighted recognition. In the Fade space, she saw Corypheus raise another Inquisition soldier up off the ground and then… just… _snap_ him in two. There was a weird moment when the image wavered, the strange unreality of the Elder One’s height and power, and the ice-knife swirl of Fade energy making Asha feel sick. Then, as her breath froze on the air in front of her, she planted a foot either side of Cullen’s prone form and released a decloaking blast.

It threw everyone within twenty feet away from her. That included Inquisition soldiers. It didn’t affect Corypheus in the slightest, and it actually got Samson closer to the door. But it didn’t matter, because then Asha was looking down, watching as Cullen bled onto the stone at the threshold of her patron’s temple. He had a stab wound through his chest. His eyes were still open, his breathing stuttering in pain, and he looked very surprised and a little disbelieving to see her there. Which was stupid, because he knew her: he should’ve known she’d come.

Asha ripped her gloves off with her teeth. With hands that were blue with cold, she reached down to place her hands either side of his face against the nearest bare skin, and pumped every ounce of magic she had into Resurgence.

It was the magical equivalent of sprinting uphill. Backward. Carrying another person. Asha had never been a healer, and Resurgence didn’t have any finesse. It wasn’t targeted, it was just a barrage - a battering ram to hammer a nail into a wall. 

But unlike the arrow wounds that she’d sustained in Halamshiral, this wound was clean. She didn’t have to worry about hastily reskinning organs, because there was no poison or shrapnel, and what she needed was for Cullen’s body to instinctively heal itself. The amount of mana though… she felt herself drop slightly from where she was already kneeling. Grit bit into her palm as she slumped over Cullen’s torso, a spill of hair falling over the both of them as she pressed her forehead to his and simply fought to stay conscious. Bright white light flared around the two of them. Her own wounds closed up, unasked, alongside his. 

Asha gained a newfound respect for Vivienne, at the fact the woman was even capable of performing this spell while standing. Exhaustion fell on her in a heavy cloud. When she lifted her head and saw the silhouette of another templar crash through the bright white aura, sword raised… she simply wondered if the spell’s duration would be long enough to heal this wound as well.

There was a yell, and a crash of glass. A flask hit the approaching templar in the side of their malformed head, and promptly burst into flames all across their face and torso. Oil soaked into the remnants of clothing, and the fire followed. As the light of Resurgence began to dim, a smaller figure barrelled in from the left of Asha’s vision. A streak of dark leathers and red curls. They tackled the templar to the ground.

“... _Ellana!_ ” Asha squeaked, as Cullen’s breathing began to even out and she tried to push herself off of him, in time to see her sister pull a curved crescent dagger and cleave through the fleshed side of the templar’s burning face. Asha froze, a little… appalled, honestly - to see her baby sister murder someone so efficiently, but more pressingly-

“You’re supposed to be with Leliana!”

“And you’re supposed to stop them getting into the fucking temple!” Ellana threw back, before launching herself at the templar shadow currently engaged with Solas.

Asha got to her feet, then stumbled as her legs proved less steady than they would normally be. Glancing back in the direction of the entrance, Asha saw that Corypheus was gliding through the archway. Samson was on his heels. He looked back at her, brow furrowed, before disappearing into the shadows.

While Asha fended off another Red Templar, Cullen leveraged himself up to standing with a grunt. “You…” he put his hand to his side, to the dented pierced piece in his armour, “you should… after them...”

“Yes, yes, yes, you’re really fucking heroic,” Asha replied. As she decapitated her foe, she turned with the swing to look at him, “and a fucking idiot if you think I’m leaving you.”

“...Fair,” he said, after a second's consideration. And then hefted his own blade with a wince, and they both plunged into the fray.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Plot, plot, plot, plot, plot.
> 
> The next few chapters are chunky guys, I hope you enjoy them xx


	85. Chapter Eighty-Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What Pride Had Wrought, part 2

Light pooled, bright and clear, under Asha’s feet. She could feel the magic thrumming through her like water. It was unlike any magic she’d ever felt, bright and pure and so clean she could _taste_ it on the back of her tongue, like the first gasp of fresh air in the dawn.

She took one more step, and the Temple sang for her again. A symphony of high, eerie notes echoed through the empty space and then, like a benediction, was answered by the clicking of locks and the grind of stone.

“The doors have opened,” Morrigan announced, needlessly.

Asha stepped down from the platform on shaky legs. Ellana stood watching her, eyes wide as saucers. 

Although Cullen had stayed behind to guard the entrance from further attack - and Asha couldn't help but think, given the look in Samson's eyes when he'd regarded him bleeding out on the ground, that he'd be safer there - her sister had caught her arm as she’d approached the temple’s entrance. A spatter of blood had bisected the freckles on her nose. “I’m coming too,” she’d said. “Into the temple. With you.”

Fear and exhaustion made Asha snappish. “You _have a job_.”

“But I also have a duty,” Ellana replied stubbornly. She glanced back towards the large, stone structure, throat bobbing as she swallowed. “She’s my goddess too, Ash, and you’re my clan. You can’t leave me behind. _You can’t_.”

And she was right. There were only two Dalish elves in this party, and it would've felt wrong to not have them both here. Asha had a feeling both her and her sister were now showing the same disbelieving reverence. This whole space - melting black goop magisters, faceless elvhenan guards, and red templars aside - was like a moment frozen in time: a laced filigree of butterfly wings preserved in amber.

Solas was also watching her, taking in their every reaction. His own face was frustratingly unreadable. She didn't know if wanted him to be in awe, like she was, but some kind of reaction would've been nice.

“What do you think this ‘ _vir'abelasan_ is offering?” she whispered to him, as the two of them followed Morrigan up the steps. Despite her veneration of the _asha’bellanar_ and the fact that she actually _liked_ Morrigan, Asha didn’t want to include the woman in their conversation. There was only so much lecturing on one’s own culture that a person could take.

Admittedly, Asha couldn’t read more elvhen than the other apostate. It was a different alphabet from Common, but one that, for her, had been fundamentally incomplete. Deshanna had shown her words in ruins that they themselves had searched. Fragments, compared to this beautiful in-tact whole. Without access to the Circle libraries that horded all the documents recovered from Arlathan (and if they were honest, ‘recovered’ from the Dalish the _shem_ had looted in following centuries), they were working on knowledge a few generations lost. 

“That thing about ‘ _halam’shivanas_ …” she said. “I literally use that word. In stories. When talking about Falon’Din. ‘The sweet sacrifice’. Is it… it can’t be death?” 

“It translates fully as ‘sweet sacrifice of duty’,” he murmured back. “Death is not always the ultimate sacrifice, Asha.”

“But.... it’s literal? Not poetic?” she asked.

By this point, Solas was studiously avoiding her gaze. And he’d only done that once before. She thought back to all his maps, drawn as if he knew the terrain. It was all be knowledge stolen from the Fade, possibly in the same frustrating fragments, but still... She gave him a sharp glance, “what do you know, Solas? What aren’t you telling me?”

“...We should not let the witch take it.”

“And what is _‘it’_?”

“I… I do not know. But it is likely a powerful artefact that has always belonged to our people. It will be dangerous in the wrong hands.”

“Great. Fucking great. Like everything and anything in this world. You got anything else cryptic you want to give me?” 

He shook his head, and she wanted to scream. She trusted Solas' judgement, but she couldn't understand his misgivings if he didn't explain them to her. A petty part of her didn’t like a _shem_ getting their hands all over her relics either, but this was the _asha’bellanar_ ’s daughter. The Witch of the Wilds had a special place among their people, earned through hard work. Morrigan wasn’t necessarily undeserving either.

“You’ve got nothing? Nothing from the Fade? From all those books you read? Any readings on the old Veil, perhaps?!”

“You are a dedicate to Mythal, and you had no idea this existed until ten minutes ago," he pointed out. "That is surely enough of an indication that no one should possess whatever power it bestows."

Another blighted example of a non-answer. And then they were at the top of the stairs, and there was no more time to talk.

“The mosaics…” Morrigan murmured, “I believe this might be a petitioner’s chamber. You see the kneeling figures?”

Asha gave Solas a very pointed look at they entered. He and Morrigan had spent months researching the lore around this temple - how could he not be seeing the things she was seeing?

A hand clamped down on her arm. 

“Footsteps,” her sister whispered, swinging her head round. Whatever she saw made her hiss through her teeth, “fuck, we’re surrounded.”

The grip of Ellana’s fingers tightened and Asha followed her gaze.

“ _Venavis_ ,” a voice echoed off the stone. Asha’s brain tumbled over the foreign word - foreign, even for elvhen, accented in such a way that made it sound archaic. Which… given that elvhen was already an ancient language… 

It seemed to be some kind of greeting, welcoming her to the way of death. While she was wrinkling her nose at her imperfect translation, she finally noticed the source. A man - she thought it was a man- pale and arrayed in strange yet somehow pristene armour, walked into view on the balcony above.

“You… are unlike the other invaders,” he said. “You have the features of those that call themselves Elvhen. You bear the mark of magic, which is familiar, but its scent and taste is that of the Betrayer. Such proof of deception is fitting, I suppose. You may have marked yourself with the same pledge I bear, but there is no way that you have sworn the self-same oath.”

Asha squinted up at him in the shadows, confused, and then he stepped into a shaft of sunlight, and she saw the same Mythal vallaslin she wore finely traced across his brow. Her gaze immediately snapped to Solas, remembering his seemingly pointless non-advice the other day. It hadn't just been his way of awkwardly fumbling the closure of their conversation.

_What was her friend not telling her?_

“What are you, then?” the elvhen - for she was almost certain that was what he was - was still talking. “How has this come to pass? What is your connection to those who have disturbed our slumber? I will let you speak, out of curiosity alone.”

“ _Greetings. I am Keeper Ashatarsylnin, of Clan Lavellan_ ,” Asha replied, summoning every last remnant of her Halamshiral training in the wonders of diplomacy. “ _I’m sorry to have violated your sanctum in such a way. Please know that I never would’ve come here if I had a choice. My reverence for the Protector would not allow it._ ”

“‘Keeper’... ‘Clan Lavellan’. Half those words are meaningless to me. The other half are falsehoods,” the man said, not bothering to switch out of Common, “...and your accent is atrocious.”

Even though she’d hardened herself to the mockery Solas subjected the Dalish too, Asha felt a wave of hurt embarrassment at the casual insult by the closest she'd ever gotten to a representative of true elvhen culture. It shocked her to silence.

Ellana cleared her throat and stepped forward, “we are inheritors of this place, and as such please trust that we’d never cause it harm.”

Asha cast a grateful glance at her sister, who’d allowed her time to recover. She’d found her voice again, and this time spoke Common. “What do you mean when you say ‘slumber’?”

“What a heritage you claim, when you ask such juvenile questions in the next breath.”

“It seemed a little less ‘juvenile’ than simply requesting your name.”

“I am called Abelas. The people you see before you are sentinels. Tasked with standing against those who trespass on… I believe the word you _tried_ to use was ‘sanctum’? We wake only to fight and protect these halls. Few are left to defend it.”

“Well, then, good news,” Ellana replied in a voice that stayed mostly steady, “my sister and I are here to defend it, too.”

“No. Like everyone else that has come before, you wish to drink from the _vir'abelasan_. That is all you are here for.”

“We didn’t even know it was drinkable until roughly two seconds ago, when you said it.” Asha pointed out.

“You think you are funny,” Abelas noted, without emotion. “You think, with your childish scrawls on your skin that mock our patron, and your stilted, bastardised dialect, you can trick us? It is not for _you_. It is not for any of you. I’ve seen your kind before - shadows in the forest, pantomiming half forgotten ritual-”

“Well then, you should probably take this chance to stop the other half from being forgotten as well,” Asha said, with all the sharp edged frustration that had been honed on the whetstone of _the past year in Solas’ company_.

That seemed to earn a reaction of vague affront. She looked up at him, and raised her voice once she found confidence in that tried and tested refuge of being pissed, “unless you’d prefer to simply yell at me some more? Give the Elder One’s army time to fuck this temple up the ass, and probably piss in that well of yours for good measure?”

Abelas, she thought under his hood, blinked. Beside her, Solas winced. She gave him a look of, _well, what would you have said? ‘Elvhen glory’?_

“Your point, though crude, still stands,” Abelas replied. “It is the only reason I would deign to speak with you now. You followed the rites of petition and earned this audience. You have shown respect to Mythal, though you do so as a child would, when dressing up in its parent’s clothes. It is more than these other interlopers have done. I do not have the luxury of choosing allies, and I must instead make do with what I find on my doorstep. So long as you leave once events have come to pass, we will help you defeat them. The _vir’abalasan_ must be preserved.”

“I don’t care about the Well,” Asha promised him. Ellana, Solas, and Morrigan all gave her incredulous looks. “I mean… I’d… I’d like to see it?” When Abelas frowned, because it seemed like no one would enjoy this conversation, she added hastily, “from a distance!”

He simply frowned. “Rest assured, it will not be despoiled. Even if I have to destroy it myself.”

Asha opened her mouth to speak, but he was already turning away, having taken the Florianne class in menacing, grandiose speeches. She turned to her companions helplessly, and shrugged. What else was she supposed to do?

“No!” Morrigan yelled. There was a flash of purple light to Asha’s right, and she realised that the apostate had shifted.

“Fenedhis,” Asha said. Things were rapidly tumbling out of her control.

Each footstep, each heartbeat. One step closer to Samson. One step closer to… what? Her god? It all seemed impossible, and was happening too fast. As their guide led them through the temple, she only had enough time for brief glimpses of murals and mosaics that towered to five times her height - mosaics that, she was pretty sure, Deshanna would have bargained with a desire demon to see.

Everything felt like a dream - where you caught the barest gestures of detail, and knew deep down that there was something important and meaningful beneath the surface that you would never be able to touch.

And behind it all, the clash of steel and pained shouts, coming from fights she couldn’t even see. They passed by a barred window, and there was a ruby flare of red lyrium as a behemoth battled four sentinels. Their bow legged guide pushed on without a breath. They didn't even glance in the direct of the violence. Asha wondered if this was anything like what it would’ve been like to watch the fall of Arlathan - to stand among wonders while the world burned itself up around you.

Endless darkened corridors eventually gave way to bright sunlight that burned her eyes. 

“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck,” Ellana was gasping. Asha couldn’t help but agree. They were on another balcony, in another courtyard, and she barely knew which way was up. The labyrinthine passages had all blurred together. When she looked back at their guide, the doors were already swinging shut on them… and on a millennia of culture she hadn’t been able to do more than glance at.

“We could have done this like _civilised beings_ ,” Dorian groaned, collapsing onto the grassy stone with a dramatic gasp. “Gotten a tour! But _no_ , we had to bring a _bog witch_ with us-”

“She seeks to protect the Well,” Solas said tersely. He sounded like he didn’t entirely disagree with her.

“Moments ago, you were saying we shouldn’t let her near it!” Asha hissed. 

“That does not mean I do not sympathise with her goal,” he replied. “The destruction of knowledge is a wilful act. There are so few remnants of the _elvhenan_ left. If we truly want to pass out of existence, then stabbing ourselves in the gut is certainly one way to do so.”

“Solas… there would be plenty of time for a grand, nuanced debate, if she wasn’t potentially about to desecrate a sacred relic _right this fucking second_. Will you make up your gods-damned mind?”

“ _Shut up!_ ” Ellana squeaked, clamping down on her sister's arm and smashing a finger to her own lips. She gestured silently and frantically over the balcony, and that was when Asha heard it:

“Fight on! An army of these bastards couldn’t stop us!”

_Samson._

He sounded like he was in the courtyard below. Their shortcut was worth it, then, Asha tried to tell herself, though she felt tears burning unshed behind her eyes as she began to crouch low behind the walls. No time to mourn for what couldn’t be: she had to get back into that battle space, fuelled by adrenaline. 

“We have to - Ellana, stay back!”

“Like fuck, _asa’malin_.”

“I’m serious, he’s-”

“- _There’s no time_ ,” Cassandra cut in. As they crept down the stairs, El stuck her tongue out in her sister’s direction, and that alone made Asha pray she wasn’t about to die.

Corpses littered the courtyard, their blood flowering crimson where their bodies hit water. The first thing Asha felt upon seeing Raleigh Samson - _really_ seeing him, not glimpsing him across a battlefield while trying to process a million things at once - was how… _ordinary_ the man looked. Hair thinning on top, he looked to be in his fifties, though she couldn’t work out how much of that was from the lyrium. 

Should she sneak? No. Better to distract him from the others in her party, and hold his attention while they got into position. She waited for Ellana and Cole to pass out of sight and straightened from her crouch, coming into view behind the stone wall. Samson looked up, watched her approach with his bloodshot eyes. 

“Inquisitor! Look at you: the little knife-eared apostate bitch!" he almost said it like it was a compliment. "As pretty as my people in Halamshiral promised.” 

Asha grimaced. Samson grinned, and then seemed to love the sound of his own voice, as he continued: “Always knew Rutherford had a secret taste for the Fade on his tongue. The ones that act like they're sexless always do. Can’t be repressed if you ain’t got some kind of forbidden craving that the Chantry Mistress holds over your head in matins.”

“I actually think he’s just got a thing for redheads, honestly,” Asha said, nonchalantly placing her hands behind her back as she strolled up. 

Of course, that was so she could start working on the satchel, to get to the rune.

“Maybe it’s your brand that does it for him? That was quite the fetish, back in the ol’ Gallows,” Samson leered. “Whatever your allure, you must be a good lay, for him to let a little blood mage like you close enough to something as powerful as the Well.”

“Um… you do realise what that is implying about your relationship to the Elder One, yes?”

That observation seemed to infuriate Samson - as she’d known it would. And she’d only got one buckle on the satchel undone, so she continued: “There’s no judgement from my end, but how would that work, exactly? He’s _very_ tall.”

“You can’t begin to understand what it means to serve him. Corypheus chose me twice: first as his general, now as his Vessel.”

“Goodness!” Dorian said from Asha’s right, clearly cottoning onto her ploy as she began on the next buckle. “And our Commander was only just allowed to move in! He must like you _very_ much.”

She was glad she’d flung her gloves off to heal Cullen from his stab wound - the pack was fiddly when blind. The clasp snicked open and loosened, sagging with the weight of rune. Asha gave a hand sign to the people behind her, to signal she was ready to go when they were.

“Is this really the Inquisition’s final moments?” Samson asked, with a sweeping gesture of his hands, “poor sexual innuendo, in the temple of your ancestors, no less? I was expecting a bit of class, a bit of intellectual conversation, before I killed the lot of you.”

“One should treat others as they want to be treated, then,” Dorian noted.

“You want serious conversation? Fine,” Asha said. She took a step forward, reaching into the pack for the rune. “I met your tranquil, Maddox. When he sacrificed himself for your cause.”

Samson looked sad for a second, though she couldn’t tell if it was fake. “I made sure to give him his choice. If he died, he died as one of us. One of the faithful.”

“I could’ve cured him,” she spat. “I _would’ve_ cured him.”

Something flickered across his face then, even more real than that initial look of sorrow. A genuine spark of humanity. Then it was gone, and Samson was sneering once more. “You really believe Rutherford would let you?” 

“...You seem really rather fixated on who I fuck.”

“Or that Chantry dog behind you, then?” Samson threw up a hand towards Cassandra, and Asha used the wild gesture to take another step forward. Her hand touched the rune. It thrummed warm under her bare skin - warmer, she could swear, than it had been back in the Inquisition camp, perhaps because of its proximity now to Samson’s armour. 

Samson was on a roll now. “You really think you are anything less than a glorified puppet, doing the bidding of an institution that would as soon step on your back and snap your spine as let you waltz around with that mark on your skin?”

Asha thought about pointing out the fact that half her institution was now emancipated mages, so his argument didn’t really make sense. Instead, she used his new-found momentum to take another step forward.

“ _I_ ended the templars, you little fool,” he told her. “You should be thanking me. _You should be on my side_. What did the Chantry ever do for you, ‘cept have a really long argument about what happened to your clan, and then decide it was a one-time oddity by a bunch of deviants? As if no man in the Order hadn’t been trained to do the same, at the drop of a fucking hat.”

“Whatever violence exists in the Order, you took it, and you made it worse.”

“I only ever fed the hunger the Chantry gave them,” Samson replied, voice flat. “For blood. For lyrium. For power. Are we really any worse than before? We hurt just as many people, then - we just never talked about it.”

“If you were really a humanitarian, you might have… um... stopped them? From hurting people?”

“All I’ve ever done is protected my own,” Samson argued. He was starting to look harried. “No one cared about us. No one. All of the templars of Kirkwall, cut off from lyrium overnight, when the riots started. In the weeks it took for the other Circles to work out if they could share their stores or risk their own men going barmy, thirty men died, and we lost twenty more to the Madness. For what? So those Circles could _also_ fall, within the month? The Chantry treated us like a mess you shove under a carpet - a mess _they_ made, a mess they spent _centuries_ making. They were embarrassed by us because they knew we were just a symptom of _their problem!”_

Asha had the rune in her hand. It wasn’t like touching the red lyrium in Sahrnia quarry. It didn’t make her hand go numb. But it… it was starting to tingle, and part of her was fascinated by Samson’s words - the parts she agreed with, that stoked a fury inside of her that she could recognise in him. She wasn’t… she didn’t _believe_ him, or want to follow him for even a single second. It was more… that was her own hurt was rising to the surface, along with heat, and the knowledge of how exactly to stamp out those who opposed her.

_I’m going to stop him_. And she was. She knew that now. She was powerful enough, and he deserved it. He’d murdered thousands.

That fury, though - it wasn’t directed at Samson. It wasn’t directed at… _at anyone_. That was the truly scary part. All the templars she hated were dead. Half the templars she knew, now, she loved. But that didn’t make the hurt go away. It was just… just… just… _there._

For a giddy, unmoored moment, she imagined turning it on someone else. Who? A faceless stranger? Abelas? Morrigan? Cassandra? 

Asha felt the energy of battle begin to thrum through her. That sourceless rage was scary and alien. 

“The power you see before you is simply the strength the Chantry tried to bind, Inquisitor. Just like the woman I see before me. Do you really begrudge me setting any of us free?” Samson said, pulling her back to the present. She was so close now, the others were probably wondering why she hadn’t begun their attack. “It’s a new world now, and there’s a new god. You've no hope of stopping us, sweetheart.”

_Ugh_. It was safer to just hate Samson.

“Power’s all well and good, until it's taken away,” Asha said, fishing the rune out from behind her with a wink. “Trust me, I’m an expert in that.”

She flung the disk at his chest, and cast a wall of fire at the templars standing to his right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Plot plot plot plot plot.
> 
> I hope people enjoy these chapters! I haven't done a proper mission-based section of fic in a while, I always worry I'm retreading old ground. I did make Abelas a petty, snarky bitch though - that was fun!! (I also love writing Samson's villains speeches far too much, perhaps I should be worried what that says about me.)
> 
> Hope everyone's doing ok! Now taking bets on who y'all think will be drinking from the Well xx


	86. Chapter Eighty-Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What Pride Had Wrought, part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: graphic violence

The courtyard exploded.

There was no other way to describe it. The wall of fire was different than normal, like a stack of gaatlok on a short fuse. It scoured the earth of the temple, exploding it upwards in a rain of dirt and throwing all the templars - even the behemoth - back and off their feet. The flames burned hotter than anything Asha had ever seen - so hot they were white, blazing bright enough to streak her vision with after images she struggled to stand. It was wider than she was expecting, too. Samson disappeared into the smoke, so far in she couldn’t even see if the rune had hit him. It was only a few seconds later, when he let out a pained, human cry, that she had any confirmation it had affected him at all.

“The fuck, Ash?” Ellana cried, coughing and hacking, before darting through the smoke and into the fray.

“Did you get him, Boss?” Bull asked, sounding like he wasn't about to trust her answer.

“I think so!” Asha yelled, as the unbearable heat began to make her eyes water. 

“Guess that’ll have to do.”

Next to her, Solas was looking at her, and frowning. 

“Don’t just _stand there_ ,” she said, shrilly, before she too dived through the heavy, choking smog. She blindly barriered Ellana, and trusted the light of Valour to guide her through.

As Bull raised his axe at the towering behemoth in what seemed to be a promise to defeat it single-handedly, Asha launched herself at Samson. He was bent over, gasping, and the only thing still glowing crimson on his body was Certainty, the sword drawn and its wicked edge gouging into the dirt. He looked up just in time to dodge out of the way of her down-swing, scrambling to the side through the churned earth. His bloodshot eyes were watching Asha, terrified and confused by the sudden loss of his power. 

_This was it._

Adrenaline began a frantic tattoo with Asha’s body as she flung herself at him without finesse. Valour was a white-hot streak of light, and when the first blow immediately connected, Samson screamed. The sound was high and reedy with pain, and it left her shocked for a moment, after so many months of carving away at rock that was no longer people. She stumbled to the side, horrified by both her action and her weakness, and that was when a different red templar barrelled into her from the side.

Asha went tumbling, feeling the grit rasp of crystal against her as she struggled against the person that tackled her to the ground. Her assailant only had one arm, and it was a new thing - the end still smouldered like coal embers. Her spell had dismembered it. It landed on top of her and smashed its remaining fist across across her face so hard she saw stars. Then it stomped its armoured knee on her sword arm, spasming the muscles so she dropped Valour.

Blind panic setting in, she reached her other hand up and frantically cast the first spell she could think of: a simple flashfire.

Its head exploded clean off.

Asha shrieked, covering her face with her hand as the crystal rained down. Her attacker was dead in seconds: the body started to drop and she dragged herself out from under it. The air stank of burning, an acrid coating at the back of her throat. Her magic was flaring in wild peaks. She wondered if it was the fact she was here, in this temple, where the Veil was thin and her patron watched over her. It would be a nice thought to have - but the sheer panic in her system made her think it was some sort of adrenaline. 

She took Valour, still blazing, and threw herself at Samson.

He span and met her with a wheezed grunt. Sparks flew off the blades. The spirit blade deadened where it met the red lyrium, the glare muted for a split second before the spirit reconstituted itself. They fought, and every time Certainty hit Valour, her arm went numb to the elbow. It didn’t matter though, because Samson was flagging, and her barrier simply grew brighter and brighter with every hit, until she was enveloped in a glistening, sparkling shell so thick she swore she felt the weight of the Fade leaking through. As the other templars in the field were felled, Samson and Asha circled each other. He was stumbling, armour smouldering in places, breathing haggard, and they both knew he wasn’t going to win this fight. 

Which was why it didn’t surprise her when he started to run his mouth again, clearly desperate for anything that would throw her off long enough for him to survive.

“So, what demon did you swear yourself to, then?” he asked, almost conversationally, adjusting his grip on Certainty.

For a moment she got a brief flash of Ishmael’s face, but it was fleeting. “What are you talking about?”

“Is it Desire?” he asked. He grinned, “I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, you understand. Lots of paths available, for a bright girl like yourself. I’m sure rage would do you just as well. But rumours were it was Desire that got to Rutherford back in Kinloch. Did they fancy another bash?”

"The only one allied with demons here is _you_.”

“You think I don’t know what a blood mage’s looks like? You’re leaking more power than the abominations back in KIrkwall ever did, girl,” he said, as he launched himself at her barrier and glanced off. “How do you hide the scars? Wonder if you have any. Always wondered if the Dalish had a fancy way of doing things…”

“Do you _always_ have to talk this much?”

“If you’ve pulled the wool over Rutherford’s eyes, I’m half-tempted to congratulate you,” Samson continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “You know what he used to say about mages? Didn’t think they could be trusted to piss without an audience. Didn’t think they could be our friends, didn’t think they deserved compassion. I’m half convinced he thought you were all demons already. He certainly didn’t see you as people.”

Asha glared at him, “I’m asking you this once more, out of courtesy: do you ever shut the _fuck up_?”

“You know the only reason why Rutherford wasn’t in that group that cut you down and rendered you brainless, Inquisitor?” Samson sneered. “It’s because Meredith _liked him too much_. She gave her best boy all the lyrium he needed, when he needed it, poor mite. He never got _desperate_ , and that’s the only reason he never-”

She knew the lyrium in his armour was inert, but Asha could swear she could feel warmth coming off him in waves. Something roared white and red and angry in her head, and Valour thrummed in her hand like she’d churned a chained lightning through her own skin. Between one breath and the next, Samson was suddenly on her other side, facing away from her. She had a hand on his shoulder, ready to push him face down into the dirt. And there was now a massive burn eating away at the very centre of his back, red and smouldering. Valour's signature, a stab wound directly through his spine.

Asha genuinely didn’t remember moving.

“You - you can’t take the Well, girl,” he muttered, then took a shuddering, wet-sounding breath. He stumbled forward and fell to his knees, then flat onto his stomach, half submerged in the river water. “Not if you’ve already got another passenger in your head…”

Again, that ugly feeling crested. Before Asha knew what she was doing, she stomped her boot on the back of his head and pressed _down_. 

Once her brain had caught up with her actions, she didn’t actually… stop.

“Asha!” Ellana said. She glanced up, and the sudden relief at seeing her sister alive and unscathed dredged her out of whatever place she was in. She removed her foot - Samson’s head drifted listlessly on the water.

“You… you killed him,” Solas said, genuinely surprised.

Asha glanced down. “Did I?”

He reached down and pumped a powerful healing spell across the man’s skin as he dragged him onto dry ground, touching only the metal parts of the lyrium armour. “Well, not for long,” he said, after checking the man’s breathing. “He was close, but it seems the armour still offers some resilience.”

Asha glanced around. “If we put the rune back on him, maybe that will-”

“No!” Solas said, and his voice came out harsh enough to surprise her. He took a sharp breath, then said, in a more level voice. “We’ll cast a prison, and we’ll take him back to Skyhold. He’s too weak to fight us now.”

“We still need the rune though,” Asha pointed out, “Dagna will probably want to see what reaction took place when the two interacted…”

Solas looked at her for a second, examining her. Then he nodded. “Cover your… cover your hands,” he ordered.

“You need me to do that prison?”

“I think yours would _crush_ him,” he replied. 

Asha… wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. She went off into the grass to find the rune. 

Solas dragged Samson onto his back, and then the white chains of a prison spell began to weave their way around his body. As Asha took a longer part of her coat and wrapped the rune in it to put back in the pack, she glanced over at them both. Samson was somehow awake again, Solas’ healing having dragged him back to consciousness. His head was dropped to the side, and he was watching her holding the rune, speculatively. Like he was calculating something.

She didn’t like that. She took one step towards him and had the pleasure of watching him flinch, before something darted through her periphery. A dark shape, flying, that was- 

“Morrigan!” 

She looked over and saw that the crow was on the heels of a hooded figure: Abelas. “Fuck!” Asha shouted, gesturing at the other members of her party, “we need to… _fuck!_ ”

She was already sprinting past Samson’s body in the dirt. Ellana glanced in her direction, saw what she was chasing, and began running alongside her. “Wait!” Solas called. Asha threw a frantic glance over at him - couldn’t he see that there was no time to hesitate?

“If you maintain the spell, I can deal with the general. Handle the spooky lady, and I say we’re good here,” she heard Bull say, but Asha had no more time to spare as she and Ellana took the steps two at a time, scrambling up the uneven rocks. As the two of them crested the top of the stairs, they saw Morrigan emerge into human form in a flare of purple light to face off against her pursuer.

“How _dare_ you?!” Abelas growled.

“Oh, I dare!” Morrigan threw back.

“Stop! We got Samson!” Asha said, breathlessly. Both glanced over at her. "Everything’s fine! The Well is safe!”

“Inquisitor. Any safeguards that were here have been ruined in their breach. The moment we leave, the Elder One will simply send more forces in to secure the Well!” Morrigan told her. “Don’t you see? It is no longer secret. We either take the power offered here, or we lose it. There is no preserving this sanctum now.”

It was then that Asha fully took in the scene that lay beyond the two figures: a flat dais, and at its centre, a large, shallow basin filled with water. The surface of it was so completely still that it almost had the sheen of ice. Although the light had a golden quality as it fell across the rocks and stones of the courtyard, the water was opaque and dark as pitch, without even a shimmer of a reflection across the surface. And beyond it, a single eluvian in a slightly tarnished frame, gnarled ivy crawling up its sides. 

“So you’ll take it out of ‘necessity’,” said Solas in a hard voice. It seemed he had finally taken a side. “I’m sure you have no other plans for it.”

“Would you prefer it go to Corypheus?” Morrigan shot back.

“What even is ‘it’?” Asha murmured, eyes not leaving the unnaturally calm surface.

Abelas was watching her with a guarded expression. Now up close, Asha could see that his eyes were the same hawkeish yellow as Morrigan’s, and his tattoos green like her sister’s. “As each servant of Mythal reached the end of their years, they passed their knowledge on, through this.”

“So it’s… magic?”

“It has no power in and of itself. It is… memory. All that we were. All that we knew. All that we now are, generations later. The moment the pool is touched by one not meant to die, that memory would be lost forever.”

“Not lost,” Morrigan said, tersely, “ _transferred_.”

Asha glanced over at her, “you _knew_ about this? You knew it was here?”

“No,” the apostate replied, seemingly sincere. “But my mother’s grimoire contained a great deal about preserving one’s consciousness and rendering it immortal. She herself would transfer consciousness through vessels. And though I have not yet fully understood her notes on the spell, one thing I’m certain it does involve is water.” When Asha simply frowned further, Morrigan sighed, “the vessel must first be drowned. I’m assuming a similar principle is at work here.”

“And you, Abelas,” Asha said, “you would rather it remained untouched.”

The elf watched her guardedly. “The moment the _vir’abelasan_ becomes bound with a mortal soul, it becomes vulnerable. It becomes... fallible. As good as destroyed.”

“And that’s worse than it just... sitting here?” Ellana asked, incredulously. “How do you know it hasn’t just been degrading all this time, if you never… you know - oh gods - test the waters?”

Abelas glared. “It is the wisdom of ages. It was not meant for just one person.”

“Then what the fuck _was_ it meant for?”

Asha did not think that it was the wisest thing for her sister to be cursing this close to the ancient relic of her god. She could, however, sympathise with the sentiment. 

“You do not know what you ask.”

“No, Ellana is right,” Asha said, stepping forward, “you mock my accent and you tell us that our people have allowed our culture to become misremembered pantomime and yet? This is just… standing here? _For what_.”

“To preserve what remains.” Abelas murmured.

“It is a question of keeping the knowledge perfectly frozen in time, or letting it become mutable and change,” observed Solas. “He fears the latter.”

“Oh, you fucking hypocrite, you can’t be serious!” Asha said, momentary worry about cursing immediately forgotten. 

“I... wasn’t saying either answer was right, _lethallan_.”

“Of course you weren’t! Gods forbid!”

“So he just wants to let his people’s legacy rot in the shadows,” Morrigan accused, and it took Asha a moment to realise her eyes were still trained on Abelas. “Inquisitor, you must agree with me,” the woman said, beseechingly, “if what he is saying is correct, then this is a chance to restore part of Arlathan-”

“And why does that matter to you, _shem_?” Ellana said.

“I have dedicated my life to the uncovering of the eluvian, I have travelled the crossroads -”

“And my sister has been destined to preserve our history since she was born!”

“El, don’t get angry, you shouldn’t-”

“No, but seriously!” Ellana said, “I don’t want it lost, but why should _she_ get it? This always happens! The elves try to salvage something of their past, and the humans take it from us and use it for their own fucking gain. Just because she’s related to the _asha’bellanar_ doesn’t mean she’s suddenly our spokesperson -”

“- I suppose it’s trade for me speaking for the Chantry?”

“Ash!”

“I’m sorry, I’m doing that thing where I joke when I’m nervous. I don’t know if we even _should_ take the Well - you guys, this place has stood like this for _centuries_...”

“The time for indecision is long since past,” Morrigan said.

“Oh, and so I should just stoop to Corypheus’ level for the sake of it?” Asha threw back, “I’m the one with the Mythal _vallaslin_ here, forgive me if I’m a little angsty about just copying his plan and desecrating an _ancient font of knowledge_ -”

“You.” Abelas suddenly cut through the cacophony of voices that was beginning to rise in volume. Everyone fell silent, and Asha realised he was looking at her. “You have shown respect to Mythal. And though your methods are clumsy, there is a righteousness in you that I cannot deny.”

“...Um, thank you?”

“What is the purpose of the mark on your hand?”

Asha blinked, “it… well, it tears holes in the Veil. And reseals them. It connects me to the Fade. Kind of like a key.”

Abelas looked thoughtful. “Is that the trickster’s plan, then?”

Solas flinched. Asha guessed he didn’t like a fellow elvhen jumping on Asha’s theories of Creator intervention, unprompted.

“I have no idea what the trickster’s plan is,” Asha said honestly. “The mark saved me, but we have no proof that was intentional. But I suppose with a trickster, even chance could mean…”

“You believe you were chosen?”

“I believe I was lucky.” Asha replied, and then frowned, “wait… but didn’t… Fen’Harel _banished_ Mythal. If you serve her, why would you care what his plan is - or rather, why would that make you trust me?”

“Another part of the history of the elvhenan that your people misunderstood,” Abelas replied dismissively. “That Dread Wolf had nothing to do with her murder.”

“...Murder? _What?_ ”

“What is it you desire?” the sentinel asked her. “Do you wish to partake of the _vir’abelasan_?”

Asha looked down at the fathomless waters. Her answer was… not really. And _of course_. She’d memorised stories of her people off by heart her whole life - how could she not want to have more reside there, and know that they were true?

“I alone have the training to make use of this,” Morrigan interjected. “Let me drink, Inquisitor.”

“How could you train for it, if you didn’t know it was here?” Ellana asked angrily.

“I merely mean that I am the one who has studied the oldest lore-”

“We have _four_ elvhen speakers here right now,” El responded, “you’re not special. This is _our_ goddess. Our heritage.”

“Ellana…” But Asha couldn’t really find anything to chastise her sister on, other than tact. She didn’t really like the thought of Morrigan getting the Well either - it felt like a bit of a slap in the face to come this far and not…

And not…

“Inquisitor, I know you’ll feel… attached,” Morrigan paused while Ellana scoffed, “but you should not risk yourself in this. I am disposable-”

“Only when ‘disposing’ of you conveniently gives you immeasurable power,” Solas observed tersely.

Asha remained silent, dread coiling in her gut. “Solas?” Asha asked, “could you-”

“No. Do not ask me again.”

She’d been going to ask him if he knew anything about it from the texts he’d studied preparing for the Arbor Wilds. The flat tone of his voice confused her even further. Such a denial, without even an ounce of curiosity - that meant he _knew what it was_. Asha span on him, wide-eyed. He _knew_. Did he? But if he’d known the entire time, and then let her blunder blindly in... _Why?_ Just what the fuck was Solas keeping from her-

“You see? I have the best chance of using this, for everyone, and I am willing-” Morrigan started.

“Why are you even bothering to argue your case!” El said, grabbing her sister’s arm. She turned to Asha, “ _You can’t seriously be considering anyone but yourself, asa’malin. You’re the First! You were born for this -_ ”

“I can’t, _da’lathin. _”__

__Ellana froze. “What do you mean, you can’t?”_ _

__Asha bit her lip, then looked from Solas’ grim expression to Morrigan, then back to Ellana. She swallowed. “El, there’s a - there’s a chance that this cure to my tranquility might not be permanent,” she said. “All… all it takes is for the anchor to fail, or my arm to get lopped off in the battlefield. We have no idea if I… I can’t take on whatever power this is. If the knowledge comes to me, we have no guarantee on its life expectancy. One wrong move, I could render all of it inert.”_ _

__“But-”_ _

__“Am I wrong, Solas?” Asha said, swallowing and turning to him. She knew she'd spared him by saying the horrible truth out loud._ _

__“I… it is possible that the Well…” he seemed to be struggling with his words, looking almost flustered - either by Asha’s admission that she felt scared, or that she, a dedicate of Mythal, didn’t want the power of the well for herself. “The bond that Abelas described, it might give you the connection to the spirits required to maintain your cure- that is… if the evanuris were gods, and the spirits held here spirits of faith… and if the bond is not itself an even bigger impingement on your agency...”_ _

__“...Or my cure fails me, and it severs the connection entirely. We lose everything, and it’ll be my fault.”_ _

__“That’s _not_ your fault!” Ellana said angrily, nails digging in._ _

__“So you agree, then?” Morrigan said, business-like once she realised the conversation was tipping in her face. “I am the one most suited to take the power.”_ _

__“I-” Asha could feel her heart breaking. More than anything, she wanted to claim something like this connection to her gods for herself._ _

__But she knew she couldn’t be that irresponsible._ _

__“Let it be me, then,” Morrigan announced for her, clapping her hands together almost gleefully. And she stepped towards the pool._ _

__There was a flash of movement, and suddenly Ellana was no longer by Asha’s side._ _

__Silent as a shadow, she darted on Morrigan’s turned back. Somehow, she now had a handkerchief in her hands. And as her arms came round and clasped it over Morrigan’s mouth, Asha realised what was she was seeing, from all her months working with Sera._ _

___Knock out powder._ _ _

__Morrigan thrashed in Ellana's grip, surprised and indignant and clearly not used to being man-handled. And as Asha watched in open-mouthed shock, the apostate went limp in her baby sister’s grasp. Ellana’s expression was grim as she laid the woman down at the water’s edge._ _

__“Oh well! Guess that just leaves me, then!"_ _

__“Wait!” Solas cried._ _

__And Ellana stepped into the pool._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that this chapter uses in game dialogue a little as a crutch, it was stuff that I felt needed to happen for the plot but I know it's not the most exciting! 
> 
> Small note, I now have a [ko-fi account](https://ko-fi.com/howlsmovinglibrary). I feel a bit weird mentioning it. I do not expect any money or financial reimbursement bc that's absolutely not why I write fic. But I've had a couple of requests for it so I thought I'd just put it here! If you're 86 chapters deep, maybe it's the kind of thing you want to click on lol :')
> 
> Another update tomorrow xx


	87. Chapter Eighty-Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life after the Well of Sorrows.

_So, long story short, Ellana now has a dragon._

Asha looked down at the last, inadequate line of her letter to Cullen, and buried her head in her hands.

It had been weeks since her sister had entered the _vir’abellasan_ , taking up an ancient mantle they understood nothing about. One month since Asha and her party had dived through an eluvian with Corypheus on their tail, dragging the unconscious bodies of Samson and _fucking Morrigan_ with them. One month since they'd had to search out the correct gateway in the Crossroads blindly, without the apostate's guidance, getting stuck in the Fade for nearly thirty minutes before Solas seemed to find the correct path. One month since they'd plonked themselves conveniently in Skyhold via mirror…

Without any of her advisors. Or their army. Who they’d all left stranded. _In Orlais._

As soon as he’d checked over her sister, whom they’d deposited into a bed - as if bedrest was a thing that helped with ancient elvhenan magic - Asha had all but shoved Solas into the Fade. She’d genuinely considered taking some more of that knockout powder to do so. She’d demanded he contact someone from the Inquisition in their dreams to tell them they had not all been catastrophically murdered, and then they waited, for hours, for one of those people thousands of miles away to sleep, after they dealt with the aftermath of the battle that she couldn’t see.

It had then taken a week to re-establish lines of communication with the few ravens Leliana had left in the rookery. A week of sleepless nights, coaxing Ellana through spasming fever dreams in which she pleaded in voices long past, while being simultaneously terrified that her friends and her lover were going to run into a roving band of Samson’s now leaderless army and all get themselves killed. Now they had updates on the returning force’s progress every three days. Which was definitely excessive, but also the only thing that was keeping the anxiety at bay as Asha watched her sister fall prey to a force whose depths were endless and unknown. 

She scrubbed at her face tiredly, and began folding the letter paper methodically, as if that would distract her from her thoughts. Of course, it didn’t. Alone in this castle, all she had was time to overthink.

It hadn't needed to be Ellana. It seemed the connection to Mythal was like the one Asha had once imagined she had with the Dread Wolf. _An anchor,_ she thought bitterly. Mythal was a spirit, inhabiting the body of Morrigan’s mother. Not a god - but perhaps once one, a small part of her heart still desperately believed. Regardless of her new crisis of theology, if Mythal was a spirit, one thing was clear: the bond would’ve cured Asha’s tranquility, permanently. Just at a great cost - perhaps one that was even greater than the pain that constantly plagued her from the orb’s mark.

A cost El now had to pay, with no benefits to reap from it. Apart from a magic she barely knew how to control, having never even known the touch of the fade before now.

As Asha readied herself to head up the library tower and into the rookery, Solas entered. Asha pushed back her chair with a screech in her haste to walk over to him. “How is she?”

Solas’ expression was clouded. “Much the same. We were able to… she could pick out individual voices this time. But not what they said.”

For the last few weeks, Asha had been staying in Ellana’s room. . At night, she was woken by her sister chanting and muttering elvhen with a strange, archaic accent. She'd been noting anything that made sense down, but it was all fragments - and Ellana herself had no idea what the voices said when they took over.

“Cursed to try and teach another Lavellan the joys of meditation,” Asha joked, but her voice sounded bitter and forced even to her own ears. She held up the folded paper in her hands. “Nothing to add to the letter, then?”

“No.”

She tried not to let her disappointment show, though she knew it did. But she was just so tired of having the same conversation. It wasn’t like the first few days, where she’d yelled and screamed and sobbed at him, at Dorian, once (embarrassingly, quite frankly) at Morrigan. The apostate’s wounded pride had meant that she spent the first day gloating over Ellana’s unqualified attempts to struggle with the Well, before Bull had had to physically restrain Asha from pouncing on her and punching her smug face in. 

But even after the offense had been overcome and sincere attempts to help were made, there seemed to be nothing that Morrigan could do. She’d whipped up a teleportation spell from her mother’s grimoire and taken them to another of Mythal's places of worship, once Flemeth told them that was where they needed to go. But it seemed that Flemeth’s revelation regarding the Protector had come as a shock to her as well. The apostate had simultaneously overexaggerated and understated her own qualifications on ‘deep elvhenan mysteries’ when bragging by the _vir’abelessan_. 

And Solas… Asha looked at him now. She had no idea about Solas. 

She trusted him. By this point, she didn’t have much choice in the matter. He was her friend, and he was also the only person who’s aid seemed to give Ellana any sense or semblance of control. 

But Asha also… knew him. In a way that meant she… she _knew_ he was holding something back. She’d seen him honest. She’d also seen him pull away when that honesty left him vulnerable - and that was exactly what he did now, every day, when they walked around a half empty castle and tried to ignore each other in this completely empty library. 

Maybe he wanted to comfort her, but knew he couldn’t. Maybe he felt as helpless as she did. Maybe he had none of the answers, for the first time in his life. Unable to think anything bad of him, her current theory was that he’d held something back at the Temple of Mythal because he didn’t want to crush her beliefs - which was ironic, given that he’d crushed them plenty of times before. Maybe he’d discovered something about Mythal that he thought would hurt her. Maybe he’d known she was a spirit. 

But then, if he’d known that, why didn’t he -

“I should’ve been the one to drink,” she said, no doubt for the fiftieth time that day.

“You made the right decision.” He, too, had his side of the conversation rehearsed.

“I was a coward.”

“You drew back at the moment you knew you asked too much of yourself,” he replied, firmer than before, “you do not have to take on every burden as your own -”

“- So I should just watch my sister struggle with them instead?” 

“Ellana made that choice, not you.”

“My indecision was what forced her to… and you _know_ I could’ve taken the Well on!” she said. _Why didn’t you tell me to take it?_ she thought, in her head, as she said aloud, “it would’ve helped me, a bond like that would mean-”

“- Would mean you gave yourself up in service to an ancient elvhen god,” he completed for her. “Everything you did, knowingly or not, would be for her.”

“So?!” Asha threw up her hands. “You don’t even _believe in her_.”

“I believe they existed! And I believe in people serving themselves, not the whims of others.”

“Who cares if I serve someone... something else?”

“ _You_ care, Asha,” he said, his voice turning quiet. “Can you really tell me that you’d ever willingly suffer mindless obedience, ever again?”

“So I just watch my sister suffer it, instead?” she demanded. “I’m a Keeper! Serving the evanuris was what I was already destined to do! It might be what I’m already doing, for all we know! The Dread Wolf might - The anchor could still be -”

“You are your own person, _lethallan_ ,” he said, his voice certain. “Trust me, I know.”

“But my sister isn’t? And I’m supposed to be _ok_ with that?”

“I-” Solas fell silent, words failing him, and when he looked at her his eyes became clouded once more.

Whereas once Asha might have closed her eyes and face-planted heavily into his chest, now she just stared at the three feet of floor between them, hugging her own arms. Solas was already doing all he could to help her - and it just wasn’t enough. She couldn’t shake his strange behaviour at the temple and how she felt a little betrayed by him, though she couldn’t identify the source of that feeling. She longed selfishly for the days where she could believe everything he said wholeheartedly.

And... Creators, she missed Cullen.

“I passed the arcanist, on my way back here,” Solas admitted, as if it regretted having to say it and add to her burdens. “She... wishes to speak to you. Apparently Samson has started taking lyrium again.”

Asha grimaced, raking a hand through her hair. All this while, as Ellana fought against the Well’s voices and simultaneously denied their threatening existence, and Solas made sad faces that _told her_ he was hiding something… Samson rotted in their understaffed dungeon, his only answers spat curses when she went down to (badly) interrogate him. She supposed, perversely, that it was good that he was taking lyrium again - the withdrawal after Dagna had dismantled his armour had resulted in him being incoherent for days.

Another problem she felt completely unqualified to handle, and all the templar inclined - apart from Cass, the one templar who hadn’t got her powers via the usual way - were all too far away to talk her through it.

She was so fucking _tired_.

Solas was watching her silently, no doubt reading every emotion that crossed her face. “No doubt it can wait,” he said. “The man cannot be tried until the others return. You... you should get some sleep, _lethallan_.”

Asha snorted. It was midday, and such a suggestion was all she needed to gauge just how shit she looked today.

Suddenly, she heard a distant horn blast, the signal that announced someone arriving at the drawbridge. Asha frowned at Solas, to see his confusion mirrored her own. They had already received their food supply for the next two weeks, and with Josie travelling back from Orlais with the army, there was no reason they would have visitors…

Did that mean that everyone had arrived back early? That was impossible! The last letter she’d received had reported their arrival in the Emprise du Lion, and that had only been two days ago. 

But the noise wasn’t anything indicating a threat. 

Asha left him, hastily jogging out of the library and across the walkway, in the direction of Cullen’s empty office and the front of the castle. When she reached the battlements, she glanced down over the ramparts and onto the bridge. There was a figure, approaching the castle, riding a single horse. 

And that figure was blonde.

“Oh, you absolute _idiot_ ,” she murmured, barely daring to let herself believe it. But then the figure - still faceless at this distance - looked upwards at her, somehow picking out her red hair on the battlements, and she knew. 

She began taking the steps down to the courtyard two at a time. 

“How?!” she demanded, arms folded, as he entered through the portcullis. “Fucking _how_?! Your... your fucking horse!”

“Ahh, darling, blessed Inquisitor, light of my life, how I’ve missed your face these long months. I’m glad to see you’ve missed me just as much,” Cullen replied, in his usual dry tone, as he dismounted with a tired smile. The fact that he actually winced as his feet touched the ground spoke of exactly how much he must have overworked his horse and himself to cover the rest of his journey, in double time. His clothes were rumpled and several days old, he was unshaven, with hair unwashed and in disarray as he ran a hand through it. He looked exactly as tired as she felt.

Asha’s heart was hammering in her chest at the sight of him, feeling like it might almost burst. She’d made a standoffish joke, for fear of bursting into tears right there in the middle of the courtyard, in front of all the people who expected her to lead them.

“Of _course_ I missed you,” she said, coughing a little as her voice choked up, and then she barrelled into his chest, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her face into his shoulder. She closed her eyes and felt all the tension leave her shoulders as he hugged her.

“It’s good to be back,” he murmured into her hair - though she wasn’t sure if she was meant to have heard him or not.

They stayed that way for a while, long enough that the very, very tired horse who had no clue as to the very romantic reasons it had been worked to the bone began dancing from foot to foot in impatience. Cullen took a fraction of a step back, enough to examine at her face, taking in her dishevelled state, and the dark bags under her eyes. “...Hello,” he said, quietly.

“Hi.”

“You look…”

At his diplomatic pause, Asha couldn’t help grinning. “Like absolute shit, I’m sure. Thank you for matching me, so that I’m not too self-conscious.”

“ _Ouch_.” He pantomimed a wince, as she took his hand and they began walking towards the stable.

In truth, even though he was clearly exhausted, he still looked absolutely amazing, in some new stupidly rugged flavour. But admitting that would only go to his head.

“Did you really leave your own men in the dust for me?” she teased, unable to keep the smile of her face. She felt physically lighter, just walking next to him. “That wasn’t very professional of you.”

“You were the one who taught me to delegate.”

“Doesn’t mean I've ever thought you’d actually _do_ it.”

“I was... worried. About leaving you alone here with Samson. Not that I didn’t think you couldn’t handle him,” he said, looking awkward. “But your letters… everything you’ve been going through sounded like a lot. I just thought-”

“- I know. Thank you.” She squeezed his hand. “I can’t… I can’t believe you’re actually here.”

He smiled down at her. “Corypheus’ forces are gone, and we both made it through without a scratch.”

“Bold words from a man who got literally stabbed, but that’s not what I meant,” she tugged him to a halt at the stable entrance - to the consternation of his horse. “You know, I could’ve waited three more days for you.”

“I know that, I just thought -”

“- But I really, really didn’t want to,” she interrupted him quietly. She leaned in on tiptoe and pressed a small kiss to the corner of his mouth. “I felt so gods-damned lonely. So... thank you. For - for being here. For the extreme abuse of your horse. I just - I really fucking missed you…”

He tugged her closer and the rest of the words were lost in a deeper kiss. _I will not cry_ , Asha told herself sternly, and so she decided to lose herself in a brief respite of happiness instead.

Asha watched Cullen watch Samson, as he took his spoonful of lyrium.

“You don’t need to come down with me. You can take a break today,” he’d told her that morning as she smoothed out his collar for him, and smoothed out the snarls in his hair her grasping hands had left the night before. It was the first good night’s sleep she’d been able to get in weeks - Cassandra had offered to stay with Ellana in case she needed anything in the night, and with it being Cullen’s first night back, Asha had agreed.

“No, I need to be there.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s going to probably insult me, and I just hate it when I know people are talking behind my back,” she replied honestly. 

But she hadn’t even considered that they might be timing their visit with the man’s new dosage of lyrium. She almost winced when Cullen tensed beside her, eyes riveted on the spoon. The flinch was almost imperceptible - but Samson wouldn’t miss it, not when he was cooped up and all he could hope to do to save himself was get under their skin.

“You got the good stuff, Rutherford!” Samson crooned, smacking his lips as he placed the spoon next to his completed meal tray, “Orzammar’s finest. Meredith herself couldn’t have hoped for a better vintage.”

“I doubt it really compares to your diet over the last year,” Cullen replied in a hard voice. 

Samson watched him for a second, examining the thrumming tension in Cullen’s body, and then he laughed. It sounded a little forced, and ended in a wheezing cough. The man wasn't in the best of health, these days. “So it’s true, then!” he grinned, “you _have_ tried to kick the habit! After all those years in Kirkwall whoring your obedience for just another taste. You… utter… _hypocrite_!” 

“There’s only one hypocrite in this room.”

“How does that work, then?” Samson asked, eyes shifting over to Asha and back. “The swearing off lyrium. What happens when she starts slitting throats? Will you just delegate the job then? Stop yourself from dirtying your hands, after you scrubbed them so clean? Or perhaps she’s muzzled you more than our lovely Knight Commander ever could...?”

“I made a choice-”

“I really don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Asha cut across Cullen, before he gave Samson exactly what he wanted: a reaction, or intel, whatever little thing he was fishing for. She’d had enough days of pointless, probing questions already to harden herself against them. It seemed like Samson really liked the sound of his own voice, and any smidgen of sympathy she’d had for him initially quickly fled at the needling quality of his words. He was intelligent, unflappable, and at this point… just enjoying whatever pain he could ring from the people who held him captive. “You had your own way of leaving the Order, Cullen has his.”

“You think he’s ever leaving the Order?”

“I’ve already left.” Cullen replied adamantly.

“Oh? Funny, how easy that was for you, isn’t it?” was Samson’s rebuttal. “How are _you_ the only person in this room, that came out of Kirkwall unscathed?”

“It must have something to do with him not poisoning thousands upon thousands of people,” Asha hastily interjected, before the interrogation once more devolved into an argument. “Now, you know what we’re _actually_ here for. What was Corypheus’ next step? How will he-”

“-How will he react to you stealing his Well and shoving it bodily into your sister?” Samson finished for her. “Well, goodness, Inquisitor! I just don’t know! I imagine it’ll make him a touch angry. How _is_ your sister coping, by the way? Have you told her that lyrium makes the voices a little easier to handle? Why do you think I was taking so much of the stuff in preparation? Just a spoonful, like this, and -”

“- The Dalish have managed just fine without lyrium for centuries, thank you, I’m sure the Well does not require it,” Asha replied. “What purpose would you being his Vessel have actually served?”

“I already told you, he needed the knowledge.”

“What exactly _for_?”

“He wanted into the Fade,” Samson shrugged, scratched his nose, “and had some old debts to settle.”

“‘Old debts’?”

“Some people he wanted dirt on. Not you, I don't think. He _knows_ you. Don’t know who it was, though.”

“And a millenia-old gossip chain would help him with that… how?”

“I just don’t know, Inquisitor,” Samson grinned. “Maybe you can ask your sister, and she can ask those voices I’m sure she’s having absolutely _no trouble_ with.”

“What was the Elder One's next move?” Cullen asked, while Asha silently fumed.

“Killing the lot of you, I imagine.”

“So he wants to attack Skyhold?” Asha pressed.

“We tracked your movements here, but he never found this place of yours. Don’t know why,” Samson said. Then he shrugged. “Of course, I could be lying.”

“You... aren’t,” Asha said, calmly thinking it through as she would if Solas was here. “If he could attack, he would’ve come now, when the place is empty and there’s no one here to guard me.” She glanced over at Cullen, “I don’t know if Dagna or Viv ever explained this to you, but there’s some serious arcane equipment in our basement. Runes I can’t even begin to understand. Dorian’s theorised that it’s some kind of protection. Given what Solas said when we first came to this place, maybe it cloaks us from view. I’m pretty certain they have elvhen derivatives, which doesn’t mean anything of course, it could be of Tevinter make -”

“I see why you like her,” Samson said to Cullen, interrupting her explanation. Asha threw him a glare through the bars, while the Commander flinched.

“Samson has _quite_ the avid interest in your love life,” she informed Cullen, in a flat voice. “There’s a lot a girl could read into that, but luckily I’m not the jealous type.”

“What a… horrifying sentence,” Cullen replied, fervently.

“I never took him for a robe chaser,” Samson continued, then glanced back at Cullen, “barely even noticed the mages were people long enough to want that, did you?”

“Yes, we’ve been over this. He hates my kind, and I hate his, so you can imagine all the kinky stuff we get up to behind the scenes, blah blah blah,” Asha deadpanned, ignoring the way that Cullen flinched once more.

“She must be special, for you to care so much,” Samson continued to Cullen lightly, sounding almost sincere, like he was offering a compliment. “What _are_ you going to do, when you have to cut her down, like the good little templar you are?”

“I am _not_ a blood mage,” Asha told him tersely.

“You’re something though, aren’t you?” he replied readily, like she’d finally started saying the lines in the script he wanted her to follow. Asha immediately clamped her mouth shut and glared, knowing whatever followed would only be playing into his hands.

“No response to that, Rutherford, you see?” Samson gestured, “did you watch her, out on the battlefield? Truly a force to be reckoned with! Even I was afraid, and I never did buy into all that abomination rot, not when it was Meredith kicking them off of the edge and straight into the blasted void. But your girl… she’s got something in her. Don’t you, Inquisitor? Something uncoiling in your gut-”

Asha didn’t say anything, but this time she was the one to tense up, remembering just what had happened inside Mythal’s temple: that mindless, sourceless violence.

It was a mistake. Tensing up, that is. Enough for him to notice, just like with Cullen. Something… _knowing_ flashed in Samson’s eyes, and it was the first time that she’d felt afraid of him since she’d started trying to have these frustrating, fruitless conversations all those weeks ago.

“I take it these insults mean you’ve reached the end of your minute-long usefulness for the day?” she said, hoping her voice sounded the same as it always did. She avoided looking at Cullen.

“Have I said anything but the truth, beautiful?”

“Aww, you see, you added ‘beautiful’ there just so I now can’t accuse you of lying,” Asha replied, sweetly. “Excuse me while I go vomit.”

“Why did you do it?” Cullen said, suddenly, as she turned to go. “All of it? Why serve Corypheus? Why doom good men to such a messy, painful death?”

Asha couldn’t fight her own wince then. _'Good men’_. Yes, chances were that Samson had absolutely doomed innocents with red lyrium. But she couldn’t fight her belief that those were in the minority.

Samson wheezed a laugh, as he kicked his meal tray towards the bars to his cell. “Oh, Rutherford, this is why you were always such an _unbearable arse_ back in Kirkwall. So self-righteous, even as people dropped dead around you. You think _I_ did this?”

“The blame does rather lay at your feet.”

“The Chantry did this, you fucking idiot. How else was this,” Samson gestured, and it encompassed all three of them: a once-tranquil mage, an ex-lyrium addict, a disgraced templar, “ever going to end well? This was always our fate. To die in a blaze of glory from the poison we were fed to keep us powerful and thoughtless. In ten months or ten years. We were always going to be the mad dogs who bit off the hands of those who tried to keep us leashed. Am I supposed to mourn the Order’s passing? Do you think your woman does? We were always going to die. Corypheus would’ve used us for something useful as the pain consumed us, at least.”

“You’re a _monster._ ”

“I’m a templar, Rutherford,” said Samson, then grinned. “And so are you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey pals, I will be taking a two week break after this posting, because I'm moving! house! in! a! pandemic!!!
> 
> I'm sorry, as I know my posts have become less frequent of late, but I also haven't written a huge amount recently so the break will also help me get more content to you quicker after this hiatus. In the wait, I have a now fully completed Cousland/Alistair chapter fic, [The Fortress of Highever](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28339035/chapters/69431430), so maybe check that out! 
> 
> Hope you're enjoying it so far, it's just dawned on me how close to the endgame of this story we actually are (!) A lot of this chapter is non-canon/canon-adjacent, including Samson's views, my take on Solas, the Well of Sorrows, and Morrigan's convenient teleportation spell. However, there is one masterful (If I say so myself) piece of foreshadowing if you know some canon dialogue, however ;)


	88. Chapter Eighty-Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The calm before the storm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings contain spoilers for the chapter, so I've added them to the endnote for those who prefer not to know the contents of a chapter before reading it!

A week later, Samson was tried for his crimes by the Inquisition. It was the first trial Asha had presided over, and she did so for Cullen’s sake.

She didn’t do it in the throne room. She’d still never sat on that throne, only gotten tipsy on the dais on their return with Ellana from Adamant. Leliana and Cassandra had both tried to change her mind regarding her decision, but Asha was insistent: she did not believe in the Maker, she would not mete out justice in His name, and certainly not in front of an audience who were already warping her into some paragon of the faith.

She only agreed to deal with Samson because his crimes were against the Chantry, the templars, and the Seekers. It was one of the few illegal acts done specifically against people the Inquisition claimed to champion, not against nations with their own perfectly acceptable legislature. Before, she’d always deferred to Josephine’s better judgement about what would upset all the neighbouring countries the least, and then signed the necessary documents. This was the only thing that she thought her own judgement had any weight on. She could send Samson to the crumbling leadership still sitting Val Royeux, but she didn’t trust them, or him, as far as she could throw them.

She took Samson out of his dungeon cell and into the war room. And then, she ordered him to be handed over to Dagna.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Cullen afterward. “We’ll still keep him in the dungeon. But interrogating him wasn’t getting us anywhere, the belligerent sod. Dagna can mine him for information, and she doesn’t even have to suffer through a fucking conversation with him.”

She figured that Cullen had resented her decision, but had remained silent in their war room trial, ever the model soldier. His face had looked stormy and pensive all day. Which was why she was surprised when he said, “...no. You made the right choice.”

“...I did?”

“We know how red lyrium affects templars,” he said, “but we don’t know how it affects m- other people. People in the north have had the stuff in their _water supplies_. Anything we can get from him could save us for decades to come.”

“Oh,” Asha replied. She hadn’t thought much beyond the solution that would get information out of Samson without necessitating him and Cullen being in the same room. She wasn’t ashamed to admit her second choice had been to hand over the man to Leliana’s people and their own ways of extracting data, but her spymaster was a bit preoccupied with an upcoming Chantry succession problem. “Thank you.”

“...You’re welcome?” Cullen always seemed vaguely surprised when _she_ was surprised by him.

As the week progressed, things began to settle into a routine, and it seemed that handing Samson over to Dagna truly was the best decision. He was chatty to the arcanist, but without any of the decades of bad blood or fresh trauma to use as ammunition. It seemed that lyrium wasn’t the only thing Dagna’s thick skin was immune to. Asha had worried about subjecting another female colleague to a constant sexist commentary, but apparently Samson didn’t do that when it wasn’t Cullen’s girlfriend in the room with him. 

“Any insults he throws at me are mostly aspersions about my intelligence, which I _know_ are more about him being stupid than me,” Dagna said with a shrug and a grin as she fitted Asha for new armour. “I think he’s just crabby. I’ve already interviewed the Commander about lyrium withdrawal - it sounds like a bitch.”

Other than that… they were just waiting for Corypheus’ next move. There were things still to do in the outside world, but Asha refused to leave Ellana to go into the field, not while the Well still took over without her being able to get it under control. She delegated troops to source wyvern hearts, to excavate more ruins, and enter the Avvar basin, but otherwise she… stayed put. 

And that’s where she’d be, until Corypheus attacked, or Ellana started to make sense of the jumble of ages currently rummaging around her head.

Cullen and Asha played chess in the Inquisitor’s quarters as the sky darkened outside. Rather than sit opposite each other across a table, they stretched out next to each other on her sofa, her legs splayed companionably across his lap. She ate biscuits in between their moves, licking sugar off her fingers before touching the pieces. When cuddled up against him like this, Asha decided it was perfectly acceptable to try distract him during his turns by snuggling against his chest and pressing kisses just above his open shirt collar. It was only when she took his second Arishok off the board that she thought it might be fucking working.

She suddenly pulled herself away from him, swung her legs around and sat up straight, placing a foot of modesty distance between them both. 

Cullen looked a little confused. “I wasn’t complaining,” he told her, glancing over at her as he moved a piece.

“I actually think I might have a chance,” she murmured, not taking her eyes off the board as she began to re-evaluate things from the position of strategy. “I don’t want to win using my wiles. That will just cheapen the victory.”

Cullen chuckled, “you’re not going to _win_ , love.” 

Asha noticed he didn’t question her possession of wiles.

“I fucking well am,” she replied, absent-mindedly beginning to chew on a lock of hair as her vision tunnelled onto the board, “just you fucking wait and see.”

After that, the room was so silent you could’ve heard a pin drop. Any of the previous softness and intimacy dropped away as Asha made the decision to become _fucking ruthless_. Normally she despaired at Cullen’s constantly furrowed brow, but the moment he began frowning, lacing his fingers under his chin and also focusing solely on the board? She _knew_ she had him. His early game had been sloppy - he could probably recover it, but not if she played flawlessly and didn’t make a single mistake.

Half an hour passed in near business-like silence. When Cullen took nearly _four whole minutes_ to decide on how to answer one of Asha’s plays, she sat there watching his agonised expression, barely able to contain her delighted, malicious glee.

Two moves later, she spent thirty seconds double- and triple-checking that she hadn’t somehow cheated. Surely, after nearly a year of defeats, it couldn’t be so easy? 

Then she made her move, and tipped over his king with one finger.

She squinted at him over the board distrustfully, “did you… let me win?”

Cullen sighed, looking at her, and then put his head in his hands. “...You honestly don’t know how tempted I am to say yes.”

“What!? Wait… are you serious?” 

He raised his head, looking more regretful than even when Samson had been trialled, and nodded once. He winced at the pitch of Asha’s squeal as she barrelled into him, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing his brow. “I’m never going to hear the end of this.”

“No… you’re… fucking… not!” Asha said, between kisses to his cheek, his nose, his forehead, as she crawled into his lap, sitting up on her knees splayed either side of him and crowing triumphantly. “Oh my gods! The student has surpassed the master. Maybe I _should_ command the armies!”

He tried to catch her hands as she threw them both above her head and whooped, nearly overbalancing from her seat. Once they were captured, he pressed them both against his chest, in a bid to get her to calm down, and he said, “ _one_ win, love.”

“One win _so far_.”

He grinned, then looked down at their positioning on the couch, and pressed a slow kiss to the corner of his mouth. “...I suppose there are worse victory celebrations.”

“No!” she eluded his grasp, taking one of her hands out of his, and poked his chest in accusation, “you have to act wounded for longer! Cry, or something! Do you know how long I’ve fucking waited for this?”

“The only sore loser here is still _you_ , love.”

Asha glared at him, but then he kissed her very persuasively, and she supposed there was always time to gloat tomorrow morning.

The next day, Cullen winced as he reached around and pushed his arm through the sleeve of his shirt.

“Are you ok?” Asha was watching him dress from where she lounged in bed, still warm in the covers - yes, she wasn’t ashamed to admit it. There was a silvery scar, freshly visible on his bare side, where she’d sealed over his stab wound with her resurgence. She still wasn’t entirely confident in her work.

“Fine, love,” he replied with a small smile, like he knew exactly what she was worrying over. “There are very few stab wounds that hurt this little, a month after the fact.”

“Is there anything I can do? To help it get better?”

His grin turned wolfish. “Goodness, I don’t know. I’m sure I can think of something…”

_Well,_ Asha thought, as he left with her with that challenge, and little more than a kiss that pressed her back into her pillows as follow through. _That’s just asking for it._

She felt very smug that evening, after she grossly abused her powers as Inquisitor, and closed off access to Skyhold’s communal baths.

“You’re kidding,” Cullen said, stunned, having returned from a day’s drill with his troops to find her waiting, seated in his office with her own paperwork, to deliver the announcement that everyone but him had to wait two hours until the ‘maintenance work’ was over. The expression on his face spoke volumes for his thoughts about people who leveraged their institutional power for the sake of a nice bath and potential sexy canoodling, and that was: extremely conflicted.

“I’ve heard that warm water is excellent for helping people’s aching muscles recover,” Asha told him, innocently. She remembered that time she’d complimented the smell of the muscle soak that had helped him overcome the ribs she broke, and then wanted to tip herself off a Skyhold balcony. She liked to believe that she’d grown, as a person. 

As his frown deepened, she got up, snaked her arms around his waist, and murmured. “It’s only for an hour or so _vhenan’ara_. I knew you’d start having palpitations if I went for anything longer than that.”

“Yes, and they would be _entirely_ to do with your irresponsible actions in a position of power. Nothing else,” Cullen replied dryly, and the kiss he gave her was so sinful she felt it all the way through to the tips of her toes.

They snuck down to the bathrooms very unsneakily, hand-in-hand. Varric raised an eyebrow as they walked through the hall together on the way down to the basement that was now supposedly off-limits, and Asha grinned back at him unrepentantly. It reminded her of the kind of clandestine shenanigans she used to get up to as a teenager in Lavellan, where everyone knew everyone's business, but they didn’t know your businesst like _you_ did. They didn’t know the naked planes of your lover’s body, or the taste of their mouth. They probably knew exactly what you were doing. But they didn’t know what was said afterwards, in the hushed, timid afterglow, when your heart was thundering and recklessly full of love.

And even though there were no secrets now, and Cullen knew every inch of her body, she still felt a moment of bashfulness as they stripped off in their respective changing areas before walking out, exposed. Asha owned this castle, but she’d never been naked in the Skyhold baths before. When she was feeling like pampering herself, she ordered a bath to her quarters: communal bathing always necessitated soaking a vest through, for the sake of her own comfort. It was a business-like affair, not intimate. 

There was something strange for these chambers to be entirely silent, when it was usually filled by the hum of constant chatter. When she saw Cullen walking through the steam over to her, her heart was thundering like she’d jumped into winter-time Lake Calenhad all over again.

“Why didn’t we just do this the first time round?” he murmured into her hair after they’d slid into the blood warm water in one of the pools, usually separated by gender. His back was to the side of the bath, as she was tracing lazy patterns in the water on his chest with her head resting on his shoulder.

“Lake Calenhad was your idea,” she pointed out.

“Yes, but jumping into it like an idiot was very much _yours_.”

“Oh come on, you loved it.”

He grinned at her, that carefree grin, honey gold eyes sparking. “I did.”

Asha traced a damp finger across that rare, unlined brow. His eyelids fluttered shut with a gust of a sigh, like he’d been holding his breath, and the tension slowly sapped from his body. “Feeling better?” she murmured.

“I’m pretty certain that the Maker could invite me to His side right now, and I’d have to very politely decline.”

“Commander! As the Herald of Andraste, and keeper of the faith, can I say that I’m scandalised!” Asha grinned, as she stood up in the water. There were definitely advantages to room temperatures, she thought, as she moved her knees so that she fully straddled him where he was sat. His eyes snapped open, and immediately darkened when he saw her hovering above him, wet hair and skin glistening as she still traced planes of his face. 

“Are you sure I didn’t die in the Wilds?” he murmured, gazing up at her.

“Certain.” She was serious now as she kissed his brow, “I resurrected you myself.”

“You’re so beautiful,” he regarded her with heavy lidded eyes, then reached up and touched his thumb to her cheek. “Sometimes I can hardly believe you’re real. That you’re here.”

“I’m here,” she replied softly, and then she ducked down and kissed him. Their wet, bare skin was frictionless as their mouths slid across each other. The heat made her toes curl. He stroked a line up her spine that made her shudder, hand anchoring on the nape of her neck under the heavy weight of her damp hair as he kissed her neck and then licked a rivulet of water from the hollow of her throat. She sank fully down into his lap in the water, and it was only afterwards that she realised that as he held her close, his fingers had accidentally caught her brand. Only for a split second.

She wasn’t sure Cullen noticed, all things considered, so she didn’t say anything. She was surprised to find she didn’t really care.

“Being in love is really quite fun,” she mused out loud, reaching for her towel as she climbed out of the water as their hour drew to a close. She noticed Cullen’s eyes followed her as the water sluiced off her skin, still entranced even though he’d just had her in his arms, had kissed her moments before. “You’ve made this war damn near bearable, and being the Inquisitor is suddenly the best thing I’ve ever known. Is there anything else you fancy? New armour? That hole in your office patched? I can give you a title, maybe?”

“Asha…”

“You’re right,” she grinned, wrapping herself up in her towel and cinching it tight, before slumping down on the damp floor next to the bath, trailing her fingers in the water. “Orlais was already bad enough the first time round, if I gave you a title you’d be like a hunted animal.”

“Asha…”

“And yes, if I fixed your office or gave you new armour, your men would be the ones doing the work, but such is the burden of leadership-”

“Asha,” he interrupted her this time, grabbing her hand as it traced a pattern on the surface. She stopped, looked at him, and he said, “I love you too.”

She smiled, shaking her head, “um… I already knew that, silly.”

“I’m half sure I’d be dead, without you.”

“Well yes, that’s what resurgence is…”

He shushed her with a kiss across her wet knuckles, somehow more intimate than the position they’d been in just minutes before. “The way you can just…. you say things like that, off-hand…” he sighed, “love comes easier to you, than to me, Asha.”

Asha thought about the prickly way she’d first treated him, the way she’d tried to fend off all her feelings and then outright deny them. “I’m not sure that’s-”

“I know that tranquility obviously made things harder,” he told her, as if he’d heard what she was thinking. “I can never pretend to know what going through something like that, what suffering like that does to a person. It’s why… every time you are vulnerable around me, I feel honoured. And I realise again. How strong you must be. To trust me so easily, now. To be so open.”

Asha could feel herself blushing at the praise. “I mean, I don’t know who it serves for me to hold myself back. I’d only be hurting myself. Look at you!”

He grinned bashfully, but then his face became serious once more. “Everything I’ve ever suffered… it always closed me off. I hurt people. I left my family, cut them off for years. I don’t know how… to trust like you do. And you went through so much more than me. When I see you, I can’t help but marvel.”

“Aww,” she said, because it was about the only intelligible sound she could make, after that speech. She kissed his cheek, then thought about how moments ago, Chantry boy Cullen Rutherford has told her he wouldn’t mind rejecting the Maker for some more time with her. “We can work on that if you want,” she promised him. “But I think you’re already a little better at it than you think.”

He kissed her again, standing up in the water to equal her height when kneeling. When they broke apart, her towel was fucking soaked, and she said, “I mean, I was about to go get dressed, but do you want…”

“We should probably go,” he told her, hastily. Asha rolled her eyes: their stolen hours were almost up, but she was the _Inquisitor_. Though she obviously hadn’t expected him to say anything different, it was still frustratingly predictable.

With a put-upon sigh, she slunk her way back through into the changing room. She noticed that Cullen tactfully waited until she was almost gone before scrambling out of the water himself, and ducked through the doorway with a final wink. She let out a long, satiated sigh, feeling like she was thoroughly on the way to corrupting Commander Rutherford’s previously unblemished sense of decorum. Perhaps she’d already succeeded.

But unfortunately, Asha could already feel her happiness beginning to dim slightly. This was merely another quick, momentary distraction from the mounting tension within the castle. She needed to go see Ellana after this - her sister had been working with Commander Helaine, of all people, to see if she could marshal the voices of the _vir'abelasan_ into submission. Then it was on to Leliana, to get her drunk and convince her to open a letter that it seemed that Divine Justinia had left behind. 

Her hair was a dripping tangled mass now nearly to her waist, so with a sigh she picked up some more towels and got to work. She wrapped it up, then reached for her smalls and breeches.

As she tugged them on one leg at a time, she heard footsteps on the changing room floor. Booted footsteps. Cullen had gotten dressed quicker than her, with all the obnoxious and frustrating proficiency of a soldier.

“My goodness, Commander,” she joked, not bothering to look up at him as she continued to lace her trousers tightly shut, “you just couldn’t stand to be away from me for more than two minutes! People will surely talk…”

There was only silence as a response, a raspy intake of breath - 

And that was when Asha froze, realising that the other person there with her... _wasn’t Cullen._

She was alone with a stranger. 

_Naked._

Half-naked, but as good as. Her back was bare - her brand wasn’t yet covered up again.

That was the horror, _that_ was the violation. That was all she could think of, in that split second when the familiar and domestic became something alien, strange, and terrifying - which was why, when the hand wrapped around her mouth from behind, she was in no way prepared.

Asha screamed, but the sound was choked and muffled behind the assailant’s fingers. Then she bucked and thrashed in their grip, but it felt like iron. She scrabbled blindly, grabbing for the exposed skin of the person’s wrist, but there wasn’t any, they were wearing gloves - so she reached back and connected her fingers and her thumb with the fleshy part of their face, grasping, and -

An intangible weight crashed down on her, and her mind became a yawning void, completely wiped blank for a second. Her ears ringed, that tinnitus _shing_ of silence after a battle. The lightning bolt spell she’d been trying to pump under their skin died.

_Silence_. She’d been Silenced. 

This was her nightmare.

Tears sprung up in her ears as her heart thundered and felt like it was simply going to fail her. Asha thought she was safe. She hadn’t - even when facing down that blighted dragon, that fear demon, she’d never been so deathly, deathly afraid.

She screamed again, but she couldn’t hear it over the pulse of blood in her ears. She turned her fingers into claws, digging them into that part of the person’s - the templar’s - face that she’d connected with, when her magic failed her. But she couldn’t see them, and their grip was tightening, it had only been _seconds_ -

The assailant twisted her arms at a painful angle, shifting their grip on her all into one hand. Even then, they were still so strong, and when Asha tried to pull away she felt something wrench in her arm.

And then, something touched her tranquil brand.

It was jagged and sharp - not human, not fingers - and that was the only thing that made her feel a split second of brilliant, pathetic, humiliating relief. At least they hadn’t _touched_ her.

Before the pain started.

Her vision went red, then black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: sexy times, fade-to-black, and a character experiencing a triggering episode.
> 
> Hey guys!! I'm back, and you can see why I didn't want to post this chapter ahead of my hiatus! I hope you enjoy it, and can hold out for the second instalment tomorrow. Another quick assurance that I've upped the stakes of this final act (bc Bioware didn't lol, they just saved it all for Trespasser) but that this story is still 'angst with an (eventual) happy ending' - I'm just gonna make certain people work for it ;) xx


	89. Chapter Eighty-Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath of the attack on Asha Lavellan.

Consciousness came in flashes. 

She was facedown on the stone, drool lolling out of her mouth. She thought she heard retreating footsteps.

Her back was on fire.

Asha screamed. This time, there was sound, that left her throat ragged. Her mouth still tasted like leather. From the gloves.

More red. Her eyes had closed again.

“Asha?” she couldn’t see his face, but knew his voice. Heard the hitch in his breathing, when he found her. “Asha! Asha! Wake up! What happened? Are you ok? Are you hurt? Asha? Talk to me!”

He tugged her over onto her back, and she moaned incoherently. The pain, the pain was so much… It left her boneless. Had she been stabbed? 

But Cullen wouldn’t flip her over if she’d been stabbed.

“Asha, love, please, it’s ok, please,” he was begging her. His arms came underneath her, planning to pick her up and move her. But that would mean people would see her - people would see her _brand_. 

And the pain, the pain-

She flung her arms out with a wordless, confused shout, to try and get him to stop. She wanted to explain… to explain that she needed to get her shirt. She just needed to put her shirt on. People couldn’t see her without her shirt, they just couldn’t. 

...But maybe she was bleeding?

It seemed she was beyond words. Green light flickered behind closed eyelids as her anchor sparked, flashed, _tore_.

There was a roar. An animalistic roar, a chorus of them, that echoed off the stone walls of the bathroom. 

And the tidal wave of magic that left Asha in a rush was so strong that she blacked out again.

More darkness, and other voices.

“She’s hurt -”

“- is it poison?”

“- unconscious, she can’t -”

Asha felt like she was swimming through tar. She had no idea which way it was to the surface, but things gradually began to become clearer of their own accord.

Cassandra: “demons? Here? How many? I don’t understand.”

“Six.” Cullen told her, “all rage. Send men down there, now.”

“She summoned them? With the anchor?” That was Solas. Oh gods, was Solas here? She was naked. Wasn’t she? “Impossible.”

“Shut up.” Cullen replied, his voice hard in a way she’d never, ever heard it before. “Shut up right now.”

“ _I beg your pardon_?”

“Or perhaps you can say it louder, and alert the entire castle?” Cullen hissed. “We need to get her to the infirmary. What the _fuck_ is going on?!”

Asha needed to tell Cullen to put her shirt on before he presented her body up for Solas to study like another one of his logic puzzles. It was very important.

“ _Vhenan-_ ” she murmured. Her voice sounded very far away, and she couldn’t manage the full word.

“Asha?” She heard a gusting sigh of relief. A sob. “Asha, love, can your hear me? What’s happening?”

“Back.” She wet her lips to smooth out the rasp of her voice. “Hurts.”

“What happened? Who did this to you?”

“Silenced.” Asha felt so embarrassed at the admission, she wanted to cry. She thought she buried her face into his chest - it smelled like him, and his heart was thundering. “Someone… Silenced...”

“ _What?_ ”

Just the thought of it made something churn within her - all the humiliation, fear, and anger scouring her like a fresh wound. Anger that she could feel so small, all over again. She thought she was _strong_. 

There was a particular kind of violation that came from being attacked in your own home -

\- But then, she already knew that, didn’t she?

That churning, violated feeling, that sudden rage… it built higher and higher within her. And she was so far away from everything, that her grip on whatever was roiling inside her was _so weak_. She felt powerless, even as she thrummed with energy. 

She was already struggling to keep her pain in check. She couldn’t be expected to mind two things.

“Asha,” Solas’ voice was like a whipcrack. “Asha, what are you doing?”

She didn’t know. 

She sobbed as her control slipped, and the magic left her in a heady rush once more. It was like she’d cut out all her power, exorcised it all in one go. She went limp, but didn’t black out this time. There was no flash of green that heralded this dip - it wasn’t the anchor. She didn’t know what it was.

There was horrible, terrible sound, like stone being wrenched from stone.

“ _Fuck!_ ” Cullen cursed, but his arms just tightened around her. There was a pounding of footfalls, drowned out by the deep, long groan that followed, like the earth itself was crying out. He didn’t let her go.

“I - I don’t understand,” Solas said.

“We’ll need more men,” that was Cassandra, and she sounded… terrified. “Get her to the infirmary. Solas, you need to get this under control. As quickly as possible.”

“What is this?” Cullen demanded. “What is going on?!”

Asha needed to tell them, didn’t she? They needed to know. But she was so scared, and she didn’t want them to know how weak she’d been… 

“Brand,” she rasped, finally. Already her magic was rushing back, and she felt horribly dizzy even in the darkness. “Something… something with my brand.”

“ _Ash?!_ ” came a scream, echoing off the walls. Ellana. Ellana had found her. Her family was here.

This wasn’t like last time. It couldn’t be like last time. 

She needed to get to her family.

The power responded to her call - but she hadn’t called it, had she? She’d just had a thought, and suddenly she was brimming with magic, and everything within her was rallying towards that single instinct. And then it wasn’t rallying with her, it was overpowering her, breaking loose of the confines of her own mind and body. She cried out - it felt like she was on fire -

“ _Solas!_ ” Cassandra demanded.

“I’m so, so sorry,” Asha thought she heard her friend murmur, and suddenly a hand was on her wrist, and a tranquil aura, the kind she’d once fought off desperately, crashed down directly into her.

But unlike the time in Redcliffe, it wasn’t like a cresting wave she somehow bobbed to the surface of. Instead, it was like two storm fronts meeting. It didn’t _smother_ anything. Solas' power met this new, unruly version of hers, and they _clashed_. Asha wasn’t treading water. She wasn’t even drowning. That made it sound like she was subject to the influences within her. She wasn’t. 

She wasn’t a victim of their fight. She was the vessel. And it felt like the very borders of her body were expanding, to try and greedily claim Solas’ power as her own. Claim that tempest. Call down that lightning.

But, once again, she wasn’t strong enough to hold it. The world crashed black and red and rust brown again.

Pillows. Sheets. Cotton against her mouth. None of it smelt like anyone she knew, which meant she was probably in the infirmary.

“She said it was something to do with her tranquil brand,” Cullen said, sounding wretched. “We need to-”

Solas, scared and harried in a way Asha thought she must be imagining: “I _can’t_ -”

Ellana, angry and tearful: “I’m not letting him-”

“I know.” Leliana, hard-voiced as she made the hard decisions. “It’s a violation. But we can’t wait for her to become conscious and ask for permission.”

“I’ll do it,” an approaching voice, that belonged to… Vivienne, of all people. Madame de Fer sounded even harsher than Leliana, completely detached from all emotion. “The Inquisitor and I are not friends. We’re barely even allies. We’re _colleagues_. Let me do it. She is welcome to hate me afterwards, in a way she cannot bring herself to hate any of you.”

“...Cullen and I will stay,” Ellana said, finally, and if Asha had a voice, she would’ve thanked her sister for knowing she should include him.

Movement, as time slipped away again. Asha became re-anchored once more when cool fingers hit her back, inching along the divots of her spine. Asha whimpered. Someone shushed her. She thought she felt a hand run through her hair.

And then the clinical press touched between her shoulder blades, and the world dissolved in white hot pain.

Vivienne’s hands dropped. Her face was cool, unreadably blank - the kind of expression a person might get when absorbed in a particularly dense academic tome. The only cause for alarm the First Enchanter had given during her entire examination was that first, sharp intake of breath when her fingers had hesitantly brushed the Inquisitor’s tranquil brand: like someone who had scolded themselves unexpectedly on a hot saucepan.

 _‘The only cause for alarm’._ Cullen felt like crying, at that thought, crushed beneath baffling helplessness. He had no idea what was happening, and that was never a feeling that had sat well with him at the best of times. It took on a whole, world-alteringly terrifying dimension when it pertained to the woman he loved.

He looked down at the body. Asha’s body. Facedown on the pillows, limp and boneless. Ellana stood opposite him, holding her sister’s hand. A sheen of magic layered Asha’s skin - a barrier, but this time turned inwards, in case… well. 

There were no visible marks or wounds on her body. She looked untouched. She could be sleeping. How could this - how could he…?

Her tranquil brand, the red sunburst that the last year had gradually begun to smooth into shining, inert scar-tissue, was red and inflamed.

“Ellana, dear,” Vivienne said. She still looked mostly unconcerned - her voice didn’t waver or break. “Would you mind staying with her? I can explain what’s going on to you in a moment, but I fear this is something I need to communicate to the Inquisition’s leadership, first. And I would not like to leave her alone.”

Ellana’s brown eyes were wide and scared. “She’s not going… she’s not going to…?”

There was a silence, as all three people in the room thought about the rage demons in Skyhold’s baths, and the fact that they would now have to repave the entire floor in the Inquisition’s throne room.

“So long as she is unconscious, I theorise it will not be a problem,” Vivienne responded, flatly. 

Ellana looked at her for a long moment, then swallowed, and nodded, looking more determined. “I’m not leaving her,” she said. “I don’t mind if that means I’m second on your list.”

“Commander,” Vivienne said. Cullen looked up from Asha’s inert form, and the First Enchanter said, without an ounce of pity, “with me.”

He pressed a kiss to Asha’s hair, then nodded, and followed Madame de Fer out of the infirmary. He tried to pay attention to the instructions she gave the healers, but already a haze he recognised as shock was beginning to settle over him, and he struggled to retain the details in his head. Solas and Josephine were hovering in the corridor outside - Leliana and Cassandra having gone to deal with… things. “Get the Nightingale and the Lady Seeker,” Vivienne ordered him. Cullen nodded, and peeled off as the others went to the war room, taking refuge in orders that made him feel like he had more of a handle on the situation. He wasn’t sure he’d really spoken since Asha’s last dredge of consciousness.

He got Leliana and Cassandra - the latter with the tell-tale vapours of sulphur and coal smoke still clinging to her armour. 

He ran into Rylen, and posted guards to the doors of the infirmary. His gut twinged and told him he was a traitor as he instructed his friend to find at least one templar to do the job.

It didn’t feel real. The sky was darkening outside in an early summer dusk, painting the large vaunted window he passed in peaches and purples. Only an hour or so ago, Asha had been above him, laughing, skin flushed from steam and water dripping from copper dark curls. Now they were in the middle of some kind of crisis, and the moment where the fates had flipped, _he hadn’t been there-_

He walked to the war room, and they held a meeting.

Solas was pacing, hands clasped behind his back and his brow furrowed like the intensity of his gaze could scour lines in the floor beneath their feet. Vivienne was similarly deep in thought, until the time came for her to deliver her verdict.

“I have never seen this before, so I cannot be certain,” the First Enchanter said. “But I believe the Inquisitor has been compromised by red lyrium.”

Cullen expected to feel something: a punch to the gut of shock, a wave of relief at there being an immediate answer. All he felt was himself hollow out more, that yearning emptiness that he used to associate with his cravings for lyrium. Was he surprised? Of course not. He had known, hadn’t he? _He had known_.

And he had told someone.

“You told me it didn’t affect mages,” he said, levelling a glare at Solas. Even though he knew it was petty and inefficient, he couldn’t _not_ say it, in the blind search for something or someone to blame.

Someone to blame for the fact he hadn’t done _anything_.

“I told you I didn’t _think_ it affected mages,” Solas retorted, clearly already reaching the same conclusion as him and trying to counteract it. “But… but it _shouldn’t_! It shouldn’t be affecting her! It’s _poison_ , not… not an _aid_ -”

“Did it look to you like it was helping her?” Cullen demanded, remembering how she’d writhed and sobbed with pain in his arms.

“Red lyrium _interrupts_ a templar’s magic and feeds off the energy of their casting to grow itself and intertwine more with the bones and nervous system,” Solas continued, biting off the words. “A- the Inquisitor’s magic was out of control. Red lyrium should stifle it, disrupt it, cripple it at the source… I - I - I don’t understand-”

“It’s not interacting with her body,” Vivienne cut across the two of them, and all the women in the room looked slightly unimpressed at the deviation from topic, although they were all so grim-faced it was hard to tell. “Forgive me for not being more specific. The red lyrium has not compromised the Inquisitor…” She pursed her lips, “it’s compromised her brand.”

Cullen paused, then shut his eyes as if bracing against a physical blow, as things began to fall, devastatingly, into place. There was a sharp intake of breath from Solas, and Vivienne paused, clearly expecting another outburst of argument. 

When nothing happened, she continued, in the cadence of a lecture: “As First Enchanter, I had some… _visibility_ of the tranquility process. Obviously, they did not tell us the full extent of the procedure, for fear we would conjure some means of reversing it ourselves. But, as you all probably know, it involves a lyrium brand that is embedded against and into the skin, sealing off a mage’s access to the Fade. The Commander says that he found the Inquisitor…” she winced delicately, “face down. I believe the assailant somehow applied red lyrium - or imbued it into - the brand, and it is now causing a malfunction.”

“But wasn’t the brand already -”

Vivienne silenced Josephine’s interjection with a hand.

“In the Inquisitor, we have two separate phenomena. We have the Anchor,” she raised her hand in demonstration, “providing direct connection to the Fade, of such an unprecedented magnitude that it overwhelms the tranquil seal. But this does not mean - nor has it _ever_ meant - that the tranquil brand itself was rendered inert. The magic of the Rite was simply unable and perhaps incapable of severing a connection to the Fade such as we have never encountered in living memory. Despite two trips directly into the Fade, the Inquisitor still reported a null feeling across the area. We have all had our fears of what happens if the anchor fails her.”

Leliana frowned, “so the brand-”

“Asha’s magic remains intact. It is the seal’s magic that has been interfered with,” Solas finished, and Cullen’s mind began to race with the implications. 

The tranquil brand, crafted by an arcanist, was a templar magic: that is, it relied on the powers of lyrium. It could not come from the Fade, of course: that was the whole point of tranquility, to completely cut a person off from what lay beyond the Veil. Like the resistance of the templars - like the immunity of the dwarves in Orzammar - it was a separate brand of artificed magic, fed by a separate fuel.

And all those branches of magic - all those fed by lyrium - could be poisoned and warped by the introduction of red lyrium into the system.

That was when Cullen’s dread began to settle in.

He’d been so focused on what red lyrium would do to Ash as a mage. He’d forgotten… he’d _forgotten_ that Asha was _no ordinary mage._

“If what I think has happened has taken place, we have a new problem,” Vivienne continued, rubbing her temple. “We have a mage with a direct connection to the Fade that already overloads her physiology to the point of counteracting the Rite, and now we have a _malfunctioning tranquil brand_. Maker knows what that means.”

“It… it probably means the same as what it means for Red Templars, doesn’t it?” Cullen said, his voice sounding almost like it didn’t belong to him. “The mood swings… the violence… the… the pain.”

“Well, suffice to say, an untainted lyrium tranquil brand seals the subject off from magic entirely. We can assume that a tranquil brand imbued with red lyrium might very well do the opposite,” that was finally when Vivienne sighed. “I will ask Dagna to examine her to be sure - she is the new expert in these areas.”

“We need to ask the Inquisitor’s permission-” Josephine started.

Cullen didn’t hear the rest. His thoughts were consumed with the after images of the Veil tearing above them as he held Asha in his arms, and the rage demons that had poured through. _She’d_ done that. He already knew that she’d done that. But was Vivienne… was Vivienne saying…

“Red lyrium feeds off magic like a cancer,” Solas muttered through gritted teeth. “It feeds on the bodies it inhabits. It is in its interest to invite more energy into the subject, to aid the process and fuel its growth. We know now that lyrium is living - we may not be able to gauge its level of sentience but the tainted kind is not unlike… a… well. A demon.”

Cullen could feel himself slipping away from the conversation as horror fully began to crest. 

_None of it had been intentional_. He’d known that as well, of course. But Cullen had thought that that was because of the trauma of whatever attack had taken place - that it was a wild and unchecked response to the violence she’d suffered. 

But what Vivienne was saying was that it hadn’t just been just a flashing, feral moment that would pass once the fear left her. 

She was saying that Asha’s control was permanently broken. She was saying that her magic was volatile and unhindered. She was saying-

“It could still pass,” the First Enchanter was saying, though her voice held out no hope, “we are only two hours in. But I can assume that whoever did this knew what effect they would be causing. If the symptoms were fleeting, I would personally pick my moment more carefully. On the battlefield or at a diplomatic event, not infiltrating a romantic tryst in a bathhouse. They chose an instance of vulnerability, to be sure, but not a convenient one. Presumably, the aim was a impactful comprising act. And if the effects are permanent, we have a mage of unchecked power, and there is only one word for that-”

“The Inquisitor is an abomination,” Leliana said, putting Cullen’s every darkest nightmare into words.

“An abomination, unlike any we have ever seen,” Vivienne confirmed grimly. And that was the moment his world fell apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... um. Happy Valentine's Day?! (the evil side of me cackled when I realised how the chapter posting stars have aligned because of the one week's delay in my house move).
> 
> Hope this isn't soul destroying!! xx


	90. Chapter Ninety

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aftermaths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: BIG. SAD. (aka the author earning her 'hurt/comfort' and 'angst with a happy ending' tags)

Asha opened her eyes to darkness. 

She was lying on her back… in her bed. In the Inquisitor’s quarters. In her nightclothes, the canopy above her. Her mouth tasted disgusting. The curtains were drawn.

Gods, she needed to pee.

She shifted in her bed, and was surprised when she felt a heavy weight dragging on her. Looking over, she saw Ellana slumped face down on the bedspread, having fallen asleep sitting at her bedside. It was a near mirror of what Asha had done, these last few weeks, as Ellana had struggled with the Well’s presence in her mind. Asha was well versed in sneaking around her sleeping sister, so she carefully inched out from under the covers. Her muscles were heavy with disuse as she walked over to the privy antechamber to relieve herself. 

There, she swilled out her stale mouth with water and stretched, feeling a slight twinge in her back.

There was a sliver of daylight breaking through the thick curtains, a single line that weaved across the floor and the furniture. Asha walked over, prised one of the drapes back, opening the tall window. She felt so disgusting, she wanted sunlight, and fresh air - anything to wake her up. Head upturned to the sun, eyes closed, she stepped out barefoot onto the balcony.

There was a sudden intake of breath from somewhere next to her, and she nearly wet herself with the surprise. Asha’s eyes snapped open, and she let out a little squeak-scream when she saw a guard in full Inquisition armour, stood on her balcony, hand on the hilt of the sword at his side. 

There was horrible moment of recognition: it was the guard who’d once attacked her in Haven. The templar. _Fuck._ Time had changed him little, though he had a small chunk missing from his left ear. Asha and him both looked at each other in silent, mutual horror. She hadn’t even been aware he’d lived through Adamant, never mind the Arbor Wilds.

“Ash…?” came a sleepy murmur from Ellana inside.

“Inquisitor,” came another voice. And on the other side of the balcony, was honey-on-bread Brienne, also in Inquisition armour. “Our apologies. We did not mean to disturb you. You are allowed out onto the balcony.”

“I'm… what?”

“Please just pretend we are not here,” continued Brienne.

“ _Why are there guards on my balcony?_ ” Asha demanded, voice raised.

Was it her imagination, or did both the templar _and_ Brienne flinch?

“Ash!” Ellana’s was suddenly next to her, hand on her arm. There were crease indents on her cheek from where she’d faceplanted into the blankets, and Asha noticed the way that she began to pull her back into the room. “You’re awake. Thank the gods.”

“El - what…?” Asha held still for a moment, confused, then let herself be dragged back unresisting into the darkness. She noticed that the templar’s hand hadn’t left his sword the entire time they’d spoken, and a thrill of fear lanced up and through her. 

The curtains gusted a little, with a cold breeze that was enough to raise gooseflesh on her arms, and for a split second Ellana looked severely alarmed.

“Why don’t we just… um… are you hurt at all?” she asked, manoeuvring Asha hastily to the couch. “Your… your back… it’s ok?”

“Can we open the curtains?”

“Um… we can?” Ellana darted a look towards the two guards that were now studiously looking away, with a guilty bite of her lip.

“ _Da’lathin, what is going on?_ ” Asha immediately switched to elvhen, not in the mood to be evaded or eavesdropped on.

“ _...What do you remember?_ ”

“ _I remember-_ ” and that was when it began to dawn upon Asha, why she might be concerned to find Ellana waiting for her at her bedside. Her hand flew to her back, but of course she couldn’t reach her brand, not where it sat between her shoulders. There wasn’t any pain now, but she’d been hurt, hadn’t she?

Had she been hurt? 

She remembered the attack in the baths, but nothing of what came after.

“ _I don’t think I’m hurt? Why - do the Inquisition think I’m going to be attacked again?_ ” she asked. “ _Why are they protecting the balcony? Can templars fly now?_ ”

“Oh, _asa’malin_ ,” Ellana closed her eyes for a second, and it seemed like she was fighting tears.

“ _Ellana, what is it? Are you ok? Did something happen?_ ” 

That fear that lingered from seeing the templar with his sword, it suddenly trebled, and Asha felt instinctive terror that she couldn’t quite handle. Had the assailant that got her gone for Ellana, too? She thought it had been about her being the Inquisitor, but maybe it was just some last remnant of the red templars at Emprise du Lyon, someone she hadn’t managed to find, someone for whom slaughtering Clan Lavellan was the final goal -

“ _Ash, it’s ok, you’re ok,_ ” Ellana’s hand clamped down over one of her own, and Asha realised she’d been making white knuckled fists on her pant legs, nearly trembling. “ _You’re in control_.”

“ _What happened?_ ” Asha tried to get her frantic pulse under control, but it was like trying to fight the anchor when it sparked and tore. “ _Why… why are there guards?_ ”

There was a cup of tea on the coffee table, half-drunk and already skinned with age. Now, it was iced over.

That was not unheard of - that was a thing Asha could do, of course, particularly in summer when down at the training yard. But it was normally something she did, _intentionally_. And as she had that thought, she realised just _how much magic_ she currently had thundering under her skin, in time with her pulse, ready to be called at any moment. 

Her eyes darted to the templar on the balcony. Was he still watching her? If he drew his sword on her, she have a winter’s grasp spun on him in less than a breath -

Ellana’s hand pressed on hers again, anchoring her, drawing her back into herself. Her brow was furrowed as she watched her. 

“ _Ash. The person who attacked you, they did something,_ ” she said, quietly launching into an explanation.

Asha, at a loss of what to do, dressed. Then, she sat down on the sofa, hands clasped and steepled over her knees, trying and failing not to stare numbly at the wall. 

It seemed she was confined to her rooms.

Ellana tried to keep her company, but she was clearly exhausted from the toll of the Well on top of the two days she’d waited at Asha’s bedside, and quickly fell asleep, curled up in the armchair opposite. Asha let her. The guards switched around midday, and one of them she recognised as the ash blonde templar, Lisbeth, who Cullen had once offered up to her as a teacher. The woman gave her a guilty smile that Asha supposed was meant to be reassuring. She mostly just tried to regulate her breathing and the churning nausea in her gut, at the realisation that there were templars scheduled to guard her. And why. 

There were two guards on the stairway, as well. When she tried to look out into the throne room, they stopped her progress.

Samson had gotten someone to poison her with red lyrium, Ellana explained. In the flurry of activity that had followed on from whatever had happened while she was unconscious - something bad, Asha thought, from the way her sister skirted around the details - Leliana’s agents had caught someone on the track down the mountains and out of the Frostbacks. A member of the army, they'd thought. Someone nameless and nondescript, who had somehow turned up in a uniform on the trek back through the Arbor Wilds. A soldier that hadn’t been there before. A woman. A templar. 

But not a red templar, because a red templar couldn’t hide in plain sight. A red templar couldn’t cast Silence.

Asha was trying to not think about that, but already it was like a lit fuse snaking around and burning down in the back corner of her mind. Not all templars were turned, which meant not all templars were dead. How many were still among them? How had Samson called them to him? _How many were still here?_

 _It’s the paranoia_. She told herself. That was one of the first symptoms of red lyrium poisoning, she knew. She tried to observe it at a distance - but knowing that her mind was already spiralling into those toxic, artificial patterns wasn’t exactly reassuring.

It made sense to keep her locked up, didn’t it? She was already struggling to keep things under control even in this empty room, filled only with the crackles of the anchor sparking away under her skin, and the occasional shifting movements of her guards. To be outside, in the open air, surrounded by the army and the staff and the citizens, surrounded by _potential enemies_ , that would be overwhelming -

But part of her couldn’t understand _how they could do this to her?_ How could they keep her here, how could they man her door with _templars_...? How could Solas, how could _Cullen-_

There was a sound of footsteps on the stairs that startled her out of her thoughts. She looked down to find her hands were crackling with lightning, and every hair on her arms was standing on end with the static. She hastily discharged it down into the ground with just the barest whiff of ozone, then she stood, brushing her clothes free of invisible dirt as she looked up to see who had come to see her. 

Cullen stood at the foot of the stair.

He was tired, unshaven, his hair unstyled. Still, Asha drank in the sight of him. “ _Vhenan’ara,_ ” she said, and hurried forward towards him.

Then stopped.

They both... hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she saw Cullen lock up, or if she pulled herself up short out of a self-protective urge that he then reacted to. For one, awful second, she saw him as a templar, and he saw her as whatever she was now, an abomination, maybe…

Then the moment snapped and, with the force of irresistible gravity, they barrelled towards each other. He gathered her up into his arms and crushed her against his chest as Asha felt tears burn behind her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he was whispering into her hair, “I’m sorry, we were in a meeting. I had to talk to Rylen, I was down in the training ground when they told me you'd woken up, and I’m so sorry-”

“What’s happening?” she whispered, choking on the question, as her hands tightened on his shirt. “Why am I trapped here? What can I _do_?”

He smoothed her hair back with his hands and kissed her brow. “We’re searching for a cure,” he told her, tipping her face up to look at him. “Dagna and Solas and Vivienne - they’re all working on it. We have the Seeker’s tome, so we have some working understanding on how tranquillity truly works. Leliana and Cassandra are putting pressure on the Chantry as well, refusing to commit to the Divine election unless we get their top arcanists to come and look at how red lyrium would infect a tranquil rite. You were only exposed briefly, if directly, so there’s hope that-”

“No, Cullen, why am I in this _room_?” she cut him off as his words tumbled out of him. “...What can I do to get out?”

He froze, arms around her, hands tightening on her.

“I can’t stay here,” she said, trying to be gentle. “I’m going mad, and it’s not even been a day. Corypheus could make his move at any moment.”

“He already _has_ -”

“So this was him, then?” she asked,. “Not just Samson having some last ditch attempt at revenge?”

“We - we don’t know,” he admitted, after a pause. “He’s not talking. We think - we think the agent gave him something as well. He was high when we last tried to speaking with him. He’s been high for days. I’d say lyrium overdose, but it wasn't enough to tip him over. Because the tolerance he has is now so far beyond anyone else’s-”

“Then we can’t assume this was their only play. Perhaps it could be either Samson acting alone, or just a distraction technique that's part of a wider plan,” Asha told him tersely. As she saw worry begin to line Cullen's face, she tried to take refuge in the logical argument, to distract herself that she was about to argue her imprisonment _with a templar_.

 _He’s not a templar_.

But in this, it seemed he might be.

“If the Elder One gave this order,” she continued, eyes pinned to his and willing him to follow her train of thought, “then shutting me up in here is exactly what he wants. We can’t let him get his way. We have to work out how to make this manageable, and then I can leave and get back to my duties-”

“-Solas says we should keep you here,” Cullen said, suddenly.

It was Asha’s turn to freeze. Solas. _Solas_. Solas, who asked her to free demons from prisons? “Well, Solas is wrong-”

“It’s that, or keep you under a tranquil aura,” Cullen said, the words rehearsed and ever so slightly panicked. “And he - I - we didn’t think you’d want that. That feels like more of an invasion-”

“Locking me in my room like a child isn’t exactly better.”

“Not like a child-” he said hastily.

“Oh? Like a Circle mage, then?” 

The air snapped with cold, and the glass on the table shattered. They both jumped at the sound, and Cullen dropped his arms from around her. He stepped back. 

Asha felt a white hot flash of pain in her chest when he did. Like rejection, or betrayal, or fear, or all three. She was _afraid_ \- of him, of her friends, of whatever this conspiracy to trap her was -

When Cullen looked at her, his eyes were also fearful, desperately trying to read her face. “Asha, love-”

“As far as I can see,” she said, fighting to keep her voice level and her own fear and anger, now so ready to hand, under control, “I’m more powerful than I was before. Corypheus will not expect us to use that. He will expect the Inquisition to respond like the Chantry would, and lock me up. Surely it’s better that we subvert his plans and act _out_ of character-”

“You’re more powerful, because you’re an _abomination_.”

Asha glared at him, “I don’t remember ever making a pact with a demon.”

“I know,” he said, sounding wretched. “Love, I know. But the danger is just the same. You… you caused extensive damage to the castle. You had another fit, yesterday. People… were injured. We had to-”

“Don’t finish that sentence,” she said. 

“If you take the tranquil aura-”

“Why should I?” she demanded. “I didn’t do this to myself.”

“I know.”

“If… if I’m a danger, then can I leave?” she asked, “you could put me in the training camp. Or I could go elsewhere to… to recover, or convalesce or whatever.”

“All the experts on the case are here,” he said. “You could be at risk if you were alone, if anything happens, another attack-”

“I just want to be outside.”

“You can be outside.”

“With a guard? With a templar?” she asked, raising an eyebrow, and from the way his face fell she knew she’d hit the nail on the head.

“I don’t want to do this,” he whispered. “Please understand that I don’t think this is right.”

“Then _don’t do it_.”

“But there are so many people here and we’re still not sure what is even happening to you, what could happen if you interact with others-” he swallowed, looking away. “We don’t even know if we’ve found all of Samson’s agents-”

“So this is for my safety? _That’s_ an argument I’m betting you’ve used before.”

“I - you - if something goes wrong, you could _kill_ people-”

“Trust me that I won’t!” she snapped. Her voice was louder than she thought either of them were expecting. There was a sound of movement behind her, and she glanced over to see Ellana shifting in her seat, waking up again, having been roused from slepe.

“Ash-?” her sister murmured, making to stand. 

Asha span away from Cullen, feeling embarrassed and ashamed. She didn’t want her sister to watch this conversation, this... this _argument_ happen. Why should she be debating her freedom with someone she loved and trusted? Did that mean she'd made a mistake? No one else should see this, it was _private_ , and nobody else's business-

As soon as she thought that, a wave of magic left her unprompted, and Ellana… Ellana crumpled to the floor. 

Her head glanced off the coffee table, with a dull thunk.

“El! _El!_ ” 

Asha darted over to her sister and knelt over her, heart in her mouth. But Ellana was breathing. She was asleep. Asha hadn’t killed her, she’d just sent her to sleep - and oh gods that was a thing she now thought she was capable of… Could she really have _murdered_ her?

Blood leaked out from a small cut on the side of Ellana’s forehead. Asha touched a finger to it, unable to believe it was real. She gasped, and that quickly became a sob, and then became uncontrollable as her emotions peaked in an unruly wave, flowing through her like a tide that cast her adrift. Blinded by tears, she cast a healing spell. Asha was shit at healing spells. But with all the magic that left her in a river that she didn’t even try to fight or stop, she was pretty certain that she’d just healed every injury and scar that had ever marred her sister’s body. Her vision danced with dizzy spots, and she simply let it drain her dry.

Her sister was still asleep, though, in a heap on the floor. Asha couldn’t pick her up, either. She wasn’t strong enough.

Asha looked up at Cullen from where she was knelt on the floor. He was looking down at the two of them, his face leeched of colour as he took in the scene. It looked like he didn’t even recognise her. After a horrible moment where neither of them moved, he suddenly spurned himself to action. He took a step forward, crouched down next to Asha, without meeting her eyes, and hefted Ellana into his arms with not a single word.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” she whispered, as he picked up her sister in a bridal carry and walked her over to the bed. Still, he couldn't seem to look at her. “But... but look! Look at that healing spell! That was stronger than I've ever been able to do before. I-if I direct the magic into the right thing, maybe I can-”

She trailed off. Tears were still pouring down her cheeks in wet, sticky trails. When Cullen finally met her gaze, they were both silent and miserable looking. There was nothing she could say to make the situation better. And it seemed there was nothing for him to say, either.

But Asha thought he’d at least comfort her. Fight for her. But... but... he was just _there_ , unmoving. She thought…

Cullen straightened. “I promise you,” he said, his voice fierce with barely-repressed emotion, “I _will_ fix this. This isn’t your fault. Someone did this to you. It’s not something that you’re responsible for, but it _is_ something we can control-”

“Cullen, it’s my _magic_ ,” she said, scrubbing a hand across her damp face. Didn’t he understand? Even in this strange volatile state, it wasn’t separate from her. It wasn’t something they could just excise - unless, of course, they just wanted to repeat the Rite.

“I will do everything in my power to make sure you can leave this room,” he continued, so gripped by sudden purpose it was as if he hadn’t heard her. “It isn’t right to keep you here. I will find a way. Samson will tell us why he did this, and then he will tell us how to undo it. I will find a cure. I will keep you safe. I promise.”

Somehow she didn’t find that very reassuring. “Cullen-”

“I’m sorry I failed you,” he said. “I should never have left you that day. I promise you we will fix this. If you can wait a few days, I will find a way to make this better. I swear to you, we won’t lock you away - we just need to find a way to make sure you’re safe.”

Asha stood up. “Listen to me. Cullen, please-”

There was a begging note in her voice that made them both flinch. His eyes fell to the ground, his brow furrowed with pain, and he swallowed. “I will call on Solas, and get him to come and look at Ellana.”

Asha didn’t want _Solas_ , and she didn’t want anyone else to know what had just happened to Ellana. “I just healed her, it’s fine… We don’t need to-”

“I should go,” Cullen said, not looking at her. 

And then, perversely, he stepped towards her, and settled another kiss on her brow. It felt like being kissed by a stranger. Asha felt herself tense up under the strange alien gesture, tears still fresh on her cheeks. 

And then. Cullen left. Left her, locked in her room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you feel like there's no light at the end of the tunnel, I hope that it's reassuring to know that you've made it through what I, personally, consider to be the saddest chapter of my own fic. I tend to like knowing when I've crossed the angst threshold of whatever I'm reading. I consider this the lowest point, and although that might be a little subjective, I believe things get better from hereon out. 
> 
> When I first conceived of how I wanted the final act to go, I was very worried that I was perhaps making it too intense and depressing. Maybe it is. But I selfishly hope that it's understandable why _both_ characters are acting the way they are in this situation. Asha is fresh out of a coma and completely clueless to what actually took place, and Cullen is... well. My aim with the final act of this fic, and that fact that I've upped the tension in this pretty brutal way, is partly because I'm doing bioware's job for them, but also because I want to make Cullen's redemption arc stick. And sometimes redemption arcs aren't neat, but messy, and unfortunately mistakes are made even when someone is trying to do better. As I was drafting this scene, I couldn't conceive of any believable version that doesn't include Cullen fucking up in some way. Nobody is perfect, and Cullen is a more flawed character than most.
> 
> But making mistakes doesn't mean a person can't learn from them. This is becoming a wee rant, but I personally find the writing of Cullen in Inquisition and the things he says to be a weak excuse for his behaviour in DA:O and DA:II. At best, his dialogue tends to push things under the rug, or use 'tragic backstory reasons' as apologist excuses, or we can just pretend it's fine bc the Inquisitor is a 'good mage'. Instead, I wanted to actually interrogate why he might have act the way he does, and what the long-term consequences of both his behaviour and his trauma might be. 
> 
> I'm hopeful that this redemption arc, that is imperfect but still a redemption arc, one that comes with continued, dedicated work and is tested to the limit, is slightly more fulfilling than what we get in the game. 
> 
> I'm sorry that it means we have to watch him make one more mistake, though. :(


	91. Chapter Ninety-One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Inquisitor's confinement.

Cullen didn’t come back. It had been three days.

Asha hadn’t tried to leave her quarters. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to. She just didn’t think she could bear the humiliation of being shoved back into her room like a misbehaving child - or rather, she was worried what that humiliation would do to her and her fragile control. When she’d told Ellana what she’d done to her - sending her to sleep - she’d cried again and couldn’t seem to stop. 

The first day was a trail of visitors, clearly trying to distract her from her imprisonment. Harding bought chocolates - it seemed the scout had actually though she was just ill, Dorian bought gossip, Dagna bought intel and updates on how they were dealing with Samson. Bull was shifty and jumpy, pacing the room like a caged bear and flinching at every noise, and Asha tried not to notice how Sera didn’t show up at all.

Leliana came, hard-edged and steely, to check in on her condition. It was surprising that the advisors had not elected Josephine as the go-between, but Asha guessed that the Nightingale was chosen as the most hard-hearted amongst them. Had it been Josie, Asha would've been free of this room in a matter of minutes. Leliana stayed for less than a quarter hour, and left the moment that Asha started asking about what was happening at the war table in her absence. "You duties are suspended for now," she replied, as if that was an answer - but her face was clouded and conflicted as she swept out of the door. Less so, when Asha angrily threw the coffee table down the stairs after her with a blast of force, and she only managed to duck through just in time.

When Varric showed up, sidling around the splintered fragments of furniture, he had stacks and stacks of books in hand. 

“You seem to think I’ll be here a while,” Asha said dryly, the sarcasm blatantly half-hearted as she took them from him and deposited them on the bedside table she'd moved in front of her sofa.

“I don’t like this any more than you do, Flash,” he murmured.

“Oh, I think I might have you beat on that, just a little.”

“The Kirkwall vibes in this make me itch,” he told her, glancing around the room at her guards, “I think they should let you out. They had Blondie roaming the halls - you should get the same privilege.”

“I can leave, but quietly. Under guard,” she said, bitterly. “Same as Anders. Only I’m the Herald of Andraste and I’m also the liberator of the fucking mages, claiming we can be safely integrated into society. So things are a little bit different if I go all sparkly, or explode-y.”

“Blondie didn’t do any harm in Kirkwall that wasn’t…” Varric cleared his throat at Asha’s raised eyebrow, “ _provoked_. All his shit required intention. None of this is your choice. Or your fault.”

Asha gritted her teeth as his words brought a wave of injustice rising up within her. She didn’t think Varric was planning for his frankly _empty_ commiserations to result in her setting the curtains on fire, and she refused to do it in the first place. It was beneath her. “None of this ever has been my choice,” she said, angrily, thinking about the tranquil brand and the anchor, “and yet… here I am.”

“I’m trying to tell them to let you out,” he informed her, “but they don’t really listen to me, Flash. Given my track record with certain mages, I’m not sure the Seeker trusts my judgement.”

“...And Cullen?”

Varric tensed up, for the long minute it took for him to answer that question. It seemed it was only fun to meddle in people’s love life when it was catastrophically messy and awkward - not when there was real, life-altering consequences. “He’s trying to get you out too,” he finally replied, diplomatically. “He’s just a little less... _laissez-faire_ about it. He's thinking about it like an army commander would. He wants to make sure the castle is safe.”

Asha wished she could say she was surprised, but she wasn’t. She didn’t know why he was staying away, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe he’d abandoned her. He must be helping her in his own way, then. But detachedly. Like it was a project, or another mission to add to the roster.

She trusted in Cullen wanting to save her, but she wasn’t sure if she trusted him to _know how_. He had a bit of an abomination problem, after all. 

“He’ll come round, Flash,” Varric said, though she could tell his reassurances were sounding hollow even to him. What kind of person left their lover to isolation, and then didn’t visit? “He’s just panicking to see you hurt, and wants to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I promise you, he’s not the way he used to be.”

“I know that,” Asha said, and she meant it. “He didn’t cut me down the moment I changed.”

Varric couldn’t think of much to say, after that. That was a first, Asha supposed. After he finished his tea and left, she hurled the teapot at the wall, and the smash alerted every single one of her guards.

“I just threw it! _With my hands!_ ” she shrieked at them, “Leave me _alone_!” 

And then she broke down in tears again when they did, in fact, leave her alone. No doubt to inform the war council exactly what had just happened with their new crazed Inquisitor.

On the third day, Solas came to visit.

“I’ve been asked to observe the anchor,” he told her in a mild-mannered voice, while she glared daggers at him across the room. “I’ve theorised that the presence of red lyrium at the Temple of Sacred Ashes was Corypheus’ influence, not the anchor’s, but we’d like to confirm the two are not conne-”

“Just do it,” she told him flatly, holding out her hand, palm-up. For once, she wasn't interested in his explanation.

Solas silently walked over, face pinched and brow furrowed, and took her hand. They sat there in clinical silence, as he closed his eyes and no doubt pierced the Veil or whatever, to see how the violent peaks and troughs of power were interacting with the anchor. Truthfully, Asha was so used to pushing down and repressing the constant pain that plagued her from the mark, that she thought that this was actually the one part of this situation she _could_ control. It was much harder to deal with the excess of her ambient magic, that she was used to relying on and seeing as a gift.

So long as Asha stayed calm, she was able to funnel most of it into a near constant barrier. Today, she was also experimenting with keeping Valour up and glowing in a corner. The ability to power a spirit blade without contact with the hilt was completely new and unheard of. The effort was siphoning off a lot of energy, and the mental exercise was also distracting a large portion of her mind, preventing her from hurling more furniture about the place. Asha wondered whether she could just go down to the infirmary and churn out resurgences until she was spent. When Dagna had come to observe her earlier, she’d asked the arcanist if there was any projects in the Underforge she needed powering, given that she seemed to have magic by the bucket load. Dagna had been enthusiastic but nervous, in a way that Asha tried not to let hurt. She guessed she might short-circuit things, the way her body currently worked.

She guessed the advisors would also have to be consulted on the matter. Dagna couldn't go over their heads.

Daytime exercises in useless and harmless ways to siphon off the magic were at least novel enough to stop Asha from tearing her own hair out. The nights were harder. She couldn’t control where her mind went unconsciously. The first night she’d woken up once to a static cage above her bed, and then three hours later to find everything within a fifteen metre radius completely frozen, like a snowglobe. The templar guards - she'd demanded they stay in the balcony, she was _not_ having people watching her sleep - were fidgeting at the very edge of the ice, clearly having been told that Silencing was only a last-ditch option if she started causing active harm. The next two nights, Cole stayed in her room, making a conscious effort to read her mood, and jostling her awake whenever things got too out of control. But she couldn’t keep sleeping in fits and starts, and she couldn’t ask that of him indefinitely, not now he was human - no matter how much he still wanted to help.

Solas opened his eyes, and dropped her hand. “The anchor seems to be fine.”

“Good for the anchor.”

They sat in silence for a second, as Asha began to get the feeling that maybe observing the mark was just an excuse…

“I also wanted to speak to you,” Solas admitted, a beat later, confirming her suspicions. “I wanted to tell you what is being done to solve thi-”

“-You can’t seriously agree with how they’re treating me, Solas,” Asha immediately interrupted. She'd been dreaming of this argument for days, ever since Leliana shut down her cordial attempts to negotiate her own fucking imprisonment. “You’re an apostate! I freed _demons_ for you.”

He avoided her gaze as he said, “I know spirits. I know Wisdom. I knew it could be saved. This is… I wish you could understand, I have encountered nothing like this. Never, in all my days on this earth. Tranquility, red lyrium, and the anomaly? If we could predict what would happen, things would be different. I obviously do not agree with the imprisonment of mages under any circumstance, but the motivations behind your brand being poisoned are unclear. Whether Samson intended simply to incapacitate you, or transform you into a weapon, that is yet to be seen-”

“Can’t you just trust me not to play into his plans, regardless of what they are?” Asha demanded.

“Red lyrium sickness doesn’t work like that, and you know it,” he replied, “we are hoping, if we give you time to recover, that a small dose does not produce the effects of continued exposure as it did with templars. Not only are you a brand new type of abomination, but you are _ill, lethallan_. You need rest. We are simply trying to help aid your recovery-”

“Bullshit. Can you not see how stupid that is? It means the Elder One could win tomorrow, if he wanted to. He’d just need to attack. Are we really going to let him dictate our actions? Surely that’s what he wants!”

She hadn’t tried this line of argument with Leliana, who was too ruthless to care about the life of the individual when weighed up against everyone else. Asha was half-convinced that if she tried to get the Nightingale to go off-script in regards to her new illness, the woman would simply kill her for the sake of efficiency. 

Solas, however, looked uncomfortable. “If you were comfortable being Silenced, it would be a different matter entirely,” he said. “But I don’t want you to suffer through that-”

“Have you asked what _I_ want?” Asha demanded. “No! You’ve just left me in this room, and none of you have asked me what I think we should do.”

He fell silent, then murmured, “...you really should be resting, _lethallan_. You were catatonic for three days. We weren't sure you'd even wake up.”

“And now I’ve been awake for three days!” she replied, “with nothing to do but come up with solutions less stupid than whatever you’re fucking doing. But no one will stay long enough to listen to me!”

He opened his mouth to speak, but she didn’t give him the chance to take breath before continuing: “I’ve been thinking - if my connection to the Fade is completely re-established or somehow enhanced now, why don’t you fadewalk with me at night? At best, this new influx of magic might mean I'm a _somniari_ now. If I gain the ability to do walk in dreams consciously, then we have a safe way to funnel my magic away from me in the night. At worst, you can join me - still control where I go, and that stops me from experiencing fear or anger, and that's stops me from triggering any magic and being a danger…”

Solas frowned, considering. “That actually…”

“...Makes sense?” Asha completed for him, impatiently. “ _I know_. And you wouldn’t get tired, like Cole does, either, because you would be resting too.”

“I’ll… pose it to the War Council.”

“ _Why do we need their approval?_ ” she demanded, getting out of her chair, “this is my fucking body, my fucking illness, and I can think of ways to manage it if you just let me speak. So what if I’m a weapon? We should use that to our advantage, not theirs. Think about it! With the power I’m spilling, you could be hurling me at those stupid Veil measuring devices of yours. I could be blazing a trail through the Deep Roads. I could finally fix all the mechanics in Skyhold’s basement and see what this place is like running on full power. I could make enough magical suits of armour to equip the entire army! I could be summoning spirits and making enough spirit weapons to last generations-”

“ _Lethallan,_ ” Solas said, cutting her frenzied speech short. Following his gaze downwards, Asha realised sparks were now dancing across the floor with every step she took.

She froze, once more fighting the immediate urge to cry. Even her _determination_ had a magical flavour now? What was she supposed to do, be an unfeeling rock?

_That’s_ exactly _what I’m supposed to be._ The irony was, as always, not lost on her in the slightest.

“You make some good points,” he told her, gently, bringing her back to the present. “You know that I think a mage's power is nothing to be afraid of. But these things _take time_. Safety is our primary concern - _your_ safety. I promise you, we are thinking of ways to siphon of your power. Please understand just how well you are doing. You are an abomination in a Chantry organisation - half our job right now is to simply not give them reason to kill you.”

“That’s not good enough,” Asha retorted. “They should fucking _trust_ me.”

“...It is not in their nature.”

“Well then, they should be the ones to change!” she glared at him, daring him to disagree. “Are you really happy to leave me here? _Don’t you care?_ ”

His eyes smouldered when they met hers, “of course I care. But it’s only been _three days_."

"Three days is enough, when you're the one being imprisoned!"

"I understand. But we must be cautious, and we must bide our time. We need to keep you safe… If you understood, just how far beyond my level of knowledge you currently are…” Solas sighed, looking frustrated. “Plans can go wrong, by pure chance! You are more than enough testament to that fact! Think how far the Elder One’s machinations were pulled out of his control, by your simple chance encounter with the orb.”

“Oh, fuck that! If we’ve gotten this far by fucking him over, then let’s cause problems _on purpose_ ,” Asha said. “Why is everyone acting like this is a death sentence?”

The silence that followed was deafening. Both of them knew: red lyrium was most definitely a death sentence.

“Fine, then. Say they _have_ doomed me... maybe I want to doom them back! Samson gave you an abomination, and he _knew_ you’d lock me away rather than use me. Because _you’re all stupid_.”

Asha kept her eyes on him as she said it, and felt the victory when she watched his mouth twitch. There it was: Solas was fighting a smile.

“See! You agree with me!”

“...That does not mean I am right,” he cocked his head. “For all you know, I might not mind seeing this organisation and the world burn.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s why you’re here with us saving Thedas,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “Look. I understand that people are scared. But _I’m_ the one this is actually happening to, and shutting me out only makes me more afraid. And right now _I'm_ the only one whose fear could be life-threatening, so I'm fucking going to leverage that. Can you please just get everyone to come here? So I can _talk_ to them? So that we can actually come up with a way to fix this? So that I can leave this fucking room?”

“You can leave this room.”

“ _Without_ guards,” Asha said. “Solas, this is my _home_.”

His gaze softened slightly .“...I can try. But as for returning your life to normal… we are still trying to make sure it’s safe for you.”

“Um... if more assassins or poisoners were coming, don't you think it's really fucking easy to find me when I'm a sitting duck in this gods-damned room?”

“Your moodswings are likely to be... bad. The further afield you go, the more untold variables there are. The more chaos you encounter. As we have no way of predicting how you will interact with the world, we should instead work on what we can predict and control: you.” Ge told her levelly, “The plan I’ve proposed is for us to work on your control, through meditation again, so that we can prove that you are a rational being who is not dangerous in the slightest. You know this. I know this. But once we prove that to them, we can do so much to change -”

“Come on! You know that doesn’t work for me. Disinterest and apathy isn’t ever going to be my strength.”

He paused, examining her, and then took a deep breath, like he was building up to something important.

“...The Commander has come up with a shorter term solution,” he informed her, in a carefully neutral voice. “If you were to have a personal templar guard, you could continue to carry out your duties as Inquisitor and we could, ostensibly, return to acting as normal-”

“Fuck off,” she sighed raking a hand through her hair in frustration. “What’s wrong with them? Like I’m going to volunteer to spend every waking moment in the company of a templar-”

Solas gave her a significant look, that made her stop in her tracks.

“Oh,” she murmured, realisation dawning. “Oh, no.”

“That was what they sent me here to talk to you about.”

“Why didn’t Cullen come and tell me himself?” Asha asked, but as she said it she understood: _because he knew I’d immediately say no_.

“Believe me,” Solas said sardonically. “I wish I knew. I imagine it may put a strain on your relationship, but I agree, at least, that he is a templar whom you trust-”

“ _Do you have any idea what that means?_ ” Asha demanded, and Solas flinched as the new, sad excuse for a coffee table followed the fate of its predecessor, got rocketed into the wall, narrowly missing the balcony windows as it smashed into splinters with the wild blast of force that rolled off of her. Varric's books toppled all across the floor, pages flattened and folded. “Does Cassandra know? ... _Did she agree to this?_ ”

“...She said she wanted to have you make the final decision,” he replied, frowning. “But I don’t see why-”

“Do you know what the consequences would be? Of what your suggesting?” before he could respond she growled, “No! Of course you don’t! _Fuck!_ I cannot even believe that they would-”

Her magic thrummed through her, brimming with righteous indignation as her mind began whirring, first to catch up, and then spiral out of control as the implications of Solas’ proposal overtook the offer he'd placed on the table. Seriously? _This_ was their solution? By the Creators, how could Cullen ever think…? 

But of course he would think that. Of course self-sacrifice would be his first port of call. He would take lyrium again, for her. No - not even for her, but for a problem he’d created in his mind, a problem she could handle… 

“I’m surrounded by idiots,” Asha murmured. Cullen was such a fucking martyr, and the rest of the Inquisition were too afraid of mages to stop him. And she wouldn’t fucking stand for it. 

Asha darted to the door.

Solas blocked her way.

“ _Lethallan_ -” he started.

“Solas, I don’t want to hurt you, but you know this is wrong, and what’s more, you are not my fucking keeper,” she said. “And if you stop me right now, you’re not my friend either.” 

He looked at her for a second, eyes searching her face. For a moment, Asha was _afraid_. The paranoia came back: they didn’t trust each other anymore, after all… not really…

Solas cast a tranquil aura.

And for an awful second, Asha thought it was on her. Until she glimpsed the two guards on her balcony slump against the wall, boneless and then asleep. She turned back to Solas, wide eyed.

“It will calm the ones down the stairs, too,” he said, as if it wasn’t a monumental testament to his skill, that he could cast such a wide net and not have her fall inside of it.

“Thank you,” she told him, and faltered, almost reaching in to hug him. 

But there wasn’t time. She had a Commander to talk to. And with that, Asha began to run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a heads up, if you get burned out from my angst writing, I have a new fluff project [Just A Moment's Peace](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29337273/chapters/72054537). It's a Zevran/f!Surana modern university AU, and contains no sadness whatsoever. I am still capable of such a thing, I promise!!
> 
> Better things are coming for Asha and Cullen - I'm excited for next week's update! Thank you for being patient with me :) xx


	92. Chapter Ninety-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Perseverance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: addiction and depression! :) :) :)

Cullen hadn’t slept more than seven hours across three days.

The first night after he’d seen Asha, he hadn’t slept at all, replaying the moments in flashes in his head. Her first falter, when she looked up at him and her expression was like she saw a stranger. When he’d hurt her, upset her, and her magic had hurt her sister: that had been _his_ fault. She’d only just woken up from unconsciousness, she was disoriented. She’d needed time to adjust to the world with the corrupted lyrium brand exerting its influence... but he’d been unable to stay away. He’d known her emotions would be out of control, that any strong feeling could unbalance her, and still he’d gone there. And said the wrong thing, as he always did, and he’d failed her again, exactly as he failed her when he left her alone to be attacked in the first place and he’d found her face down on the floor. 

He’d been selfish. It was better to stay away, until everything was fixed. Until he could no longer hurt her or fail her and her family.

And so that was the other reason for there only being seven hours of sleep - it was now paramount to find a cure as quickly as possible, so that the woman he loved would no longer be trapped in her rooms. 

Maker, he missed her.

If not a cure… then a solution.

Cullen looked down at the box of lyrium instruments in front of him.

The withdrawal symptoms were gone, these days - they had been for two months now, silently slipping away as his life gained a new purpose and new joys. But the pangs were already back, wielding their influence on his body the moment he opened the box. Cullen was never as far away from the edge as he liked to think: he was always dangling just over the precipice. It would therefore be not… such a crime. To step off.

It wasn’t a question of whether it would be worth it. He already knew it would be. He had taken lyrium for years to imprison others - taking it to free someone, never mind to free _Asha_ , was an easy equation in his head, one that required far less creative logic and arithmetic. He wasn’t useful to her right now: in fact, he was weak. The lyrium fixed that. He could take it, and what’s more he _should_.

For her. To protect her.

...Could he Silence her? Even if he had the power to, would he?

She’d never look him in the eye afterward. She’d no doubt hate him.

But they couldn’t keep her locked away. He wouldn’t let them. And the Inquisition needed reassurances – they all did, that the castle wouldn’t come apart around them. Even if they never became necessary.

...It was better than entrusting it to someone else. Someone whose training might kick in a moment of panic, who would make the same mistakes he once had, and let fear and fear alone govern their actions. Someone who couldn’t read her like he could… who would choose to smite, not Silence, in a moment of fear. In a moment of weakness. 

He was better now. A better person. The lyrium wasn’t the cause of his problems - they had once been a refuge, an excuse. A way to hide the ugly parts of himself and blame them on something else. His flaws were his own, to own and address.

_…Taking it wouldn’t change who he was._

And yet, the guilt already felt like a lead weight in his stomach. It was the guilt, right? That sense of failure, again. He’d been staving off lyrium pangs not just for himself, but for others, for those who would follow in his footsteps and later wean themselves of the drug. Asha had demanded it of him, as Inquisitor. That must be why it now felt wrong, to think about taking it again. That was the only reason he felt afraid.

It was a sacrifice. And not just of his sobriety. He was already imagining where this road would lead. He’d die before he took up arms against Asha, but if something happened… she’d possibly never forgive him. 

But she’d be alive. Right now, with a new form of abomination in front of them, he was one of the only few people he trusted to keep her alive. It _had_ to be him.

What good had he done her, the way he was now? What good had he ever done, for anyone? 

Maybe that was his lot in life - to always fall short. It was not like he’d ever earned the merit he’d been given, and he’d been a fool to hope otherwise. As Samson said, how was he the one who somehow came out of this with happiness? All his life had been marred by mistakes, by weakness, and by failure. This one sacrifice was price enough to pay at a chance to fix those wrongs. He’d rather that than have other people pay it for him.

And he’d never let it fall on Asha’s head.

_I’m a templar, Rutherford. And so are you._

…Maybe it was inevitable.

Cullen looked at the lyrium. If he took it now, the problem had a solution. It went away. And Asha might hate him, but she’d be allowed outside. She’d have her freedom. And he’d get to see her again. He’d have her safety - 

_Her_ safety. In war room meetings, with Vivienne present, and Cassandra, he said it was for the people around them. But deep down he knew it wasn’t. Once, it might have been.

But... abominations _died_. That was all that ever happened to them. They lost control, and they were culled. Put down.

He had to be there. Between her and the world. He had to be strong again, and he had to be able to fight. Because the moment the red lyrium took over and she lost control was the moment the Inquisition would choose to handle the problem. And he knew exactly who he would turn his blade on, in that moment.

If she lost control, let that be another one of his failures. Let him take that blame, and that punishment. He would not give Asha less than he gave the Chantry. In fact, he would give her everything.

...If he took it now, without her permission, Cullen took that burden off her shoulders as well. She would never have to condemn him to this choice, and never have to carry that guilt.

He looked down at that box. _I should be taking it._

And with that thought, the bookshelf to his left exploded.

Asha had… misjudged her fade-step.

She’d only wanted to get through the main hall, to hopefully avoid all the people high up enough within the organisation capable of stopping the Inquisitor when they saw she didn’t have a guard escort. Everyone else, Ellana had explained, had mostly been kept in the dark at why exactly she was hidden away - an injury from a demon attack (skipping over the fact that she’d summoned said demons in the first place).

But as she began casting it in the stairwell, all she’d been able to think was about Cullen. Cullen and his idiocy. Cullen and his blind spots. Cullen and his belief that everything was a battle that needed to be fought and won using the techniques the Chantry taught him aged fourteen, Cullen and the fact that she needed to _beat him over the head_ -

And, well, she had a lot of magic these days.

Within a blink of an eye, Asha fade-stepped directly into his office.

And somehow, accidentally, released a decloaking blast. That shouldn’t have been possible, because they were two separate spells, but it seemed like she’d dragged some of the Fade with her when she rematerialised, and the effect it had was roughly the same.

Only messier. And more disruptive. 

Dust rained down as the wood splintered outwards, and the force meant Asha stumbled back into the wall, as she heard the smashing of furniture. It seemed she had sort of materialised… in a bookshelf. Which meant that it was good that the decloaking blast burst it to smithereens first, otherwise it was likely she'd have merged with the furniture.

She coughed at the dust in the back of her throat, as the fragments and splinters settled, to reveal Cullen, watching her – and the crater she’d left around her - with wide eyes.

He looked exhausted, grey and wan. Asha realised that was how he’d looked, the first time she’d met him, fresh off lyrium and going through the pains of withdrawal. When had his appearance changed?

“Asha?” he said, “you’re… you’re ou-”

“Outside of my room?” she finished for him. “Without the world ending or my combusting? Wild, I know.”

Cullen kind of glanced, a little disbelieving, at the ten foot radius of destruction that she’d just wrought. Asha cleared her throat awkwardly. A slight twinge of guilt was quickly swallowed up by anger.

“What are you-”

“What do you _think_ I’m doing?” she demanded, fuming.

Cullen avoided her gaze. His eyes fell to something on the floor, that Asha couldn’t see, obscured as it was by the desk. She thought she could guess though.

“Solas just came to see me,” she said, biting off every word. “To tell me that you want to be my own personal templar guard. Kinky.”

“ _Asha-_ ”

“What, am I not supposed to joke?” Asha said, “because this all seems pretty fucking hilarious to me. You certainly cannot be serious! I’ve either got to laugh, or knock myself unconscious by doing violence to a brick wall.”

His expression was equal parts miserable and frustrated. “Believe me, I do not like this any more than you do, but it is the only way-“

“Is it?” she demanded. She raised her eyes skyward, and forced a chuckle. “Seriously? The brightest minds in Thedas, all in one castle, and the best thing you lot can come up with is replicating the system that broke the world in the fucking first place? That’s been in place for centuries and was already failing catastrophically _to the point of continent-wide self-destruction?_ I know we’re a Chantry organisation, but why don’t we just hand Corypheus the executioner’s axe and be done with it?”

“If there was more time-”

“Bullshit.” She narrowed her eyes at him, “if you don’t like it, then _don’t do it_. You don't have to do this to yourself!”

“Asha,” Cullen replied, tired, placing a hand to his forehead. “I love you, and I don’t want you to be afraid when I say this. Please know, truly, that it does not matter to me. But: you are an abomination. You’re a danger to yourself, and to others. I don’t want you to be kept in a room either. I know what we’re doing is imperfect, it isn't _right_ , but we need to know that if you are released and something goes awry, that we can protect people. If I take the lyrium –“

“ _‘If you take the lyrium’_ -“

He cut across her, “if I take the lyrium, the others will trust you to be able to leave your room again. They will have assurances that your magic can be contained, and they trust my judgement, both when deciding how to do right by you, and by our people. It’s the simplest solution.”

“Yes, it is,” Asha agreed, in a flat voice. “And I understand that I did a lot of damage to Skyhold, and that everyone is panicking, _vhenan’ara_. And I know it may seem like the methods that have worked in the past are the only safe things we have now. But decisions made out of fear, especially the simplest ones, are often the stupidest. None of those methods were working. In fact, I’m only _here_ , now, because of how badly they went wrong. Samson wouldn’t have had anything to poison if tranquility didn’t exist in the first place. Are you really going to undo over a year of work, for this?”

“For _this_?” Cullen scoffed, “for the woman I love? Yes. In a moment. Why should you suffer, and I remain untouched? Let me take this burden, love. Maker knows that it is high time I paid some kind of price-“

“If you think that this is somehow what you deserve, then does that mean that what is happening to me is designed to punish you, specifically?” Asha continued, each word knife sharp. “Cullen, think how fucking offensive that is. Even if Samson is the kind of asshole who intended it that way, you don’t get to think like that. This is my problem. It’s happening to _me_. It’s not up to you single-handedly to fix it. I wasn’t even consulted! You got _Solas_ to tell me!”

“There’s no other way forward,” he replied. “I’ve tried to ask them to let you out, but neither Cassandra or Leliana will allow it. The damage done to the hall was extensive, if you were in the lower levels when it happened that castle might not be in tact… We don’t know enough about red lyrium’s effect on mages. Or… tranquility. We’re trying our best to figure out how to reverse the poison, but this will be a useful stop-gap-”

“A _stop-gap_? You think I’m going to make you take up lyrium again for the sake of a fucking stop-gap?” Asha wanted to tear her hair out. “Cullen, if you could hear yourself… you’ve worked so hard! And I _fucking hate templars_! Why are you so desperate to become something I hate?”

Cullen paused, flinching at her words as his expression became pained. After a moment, he reached out a hand to her, beseeching. “You know I won’t hurt you, right?” he told her, softly.

“…Won’t you?” Because this whole conversation was pretty fucking painful.

“What if I – what if I promised you now,” he murmured, almost like he was thinking aloud to himself, “not to Silence you. Not to smite. And I’m never going to kill you – surely you already know that? We just need their approval, Asha. If they _think_ I’ll act, then they’ll give you your freedom. If I take the lyrium, it’s a gesture of good faith. It’ll give them the confidence to-“

“So, what? I use your decision to slip back – no, _willingly jump into_ \- lyrium addiction as… what? A prop? ...Are you fucking kidding me?”

This time, Asha couldn’t fight the flare of anger, and the smithereens of bookshelf next to her burst into flame.

It was just a small fire. Awkward more than anything, really. She cast a glance at it and smothered the flames with a flick of her wrist, urging her mind to quiet.

“Cullen,” she said, breathing through her nose as smoke began to fill the room and then quickly clear out (through the hole in his roof). “If you’re only going to ‘play’ at being a templar, then why the fuck are we choosing that solution in the first place? If you truly believe my self-control will be strong enough to handle everything on my own, why don’t we just… _trust my self-control to be strong enough to handle everything on my own_. And why don’t I actually get the credit for it, as well?! Rather than a templar getting a pat on their back for having a good little mage charge cowed to submission-“

“I would never-“

“ _I know!_ ” she shrieked, “which frankly makes the whole exercise really fucking pointless! _Please_ look at this from my perspective! Templars have done jack shit for me. You’re really good at slaughtering demons, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not a demon - and I’m not going to be! Templars existed because they were the last-ditch solution! Mages have controlled themselves for years, out of determination, or out of fear because there happens to be some templars extremely close-by. You think there were no abominations in the Circle? You _know_ there was, first-hand! And they flew under the radar, because this isn’t mindless! I’m not mindless! I can control myself, I just need some fucking capacity in which to do so-“

Cullen had stopped looking so lost, and was beginning to frown, as she blew his Chantry brains out (and not in the sexy way). Asha didn’t dare let herself hope, but she had at least overcome the first hurdle. Before now, she’d been denied a voice. In this crisis, that was happening _to her_.

If Cass hadn’t even tried to sway Cullen away from taking lyrium – if she really believed this situation to have gotten that bad - Asha guessed that all these Chantry idiots had been scaring each other into more and more of a panic. And you _know_ Vivienne was using this crisis to drum up support for her reinstatement of the Circles, and Solas’ brain had apparently taken a holiday-

But thank the Creators. Looking at Cullen now, it seemed she’d gotten past his first line of defences: the automatic regression back to whatever scared and frightened place he’d retreated to in Kinloch.

Maybe now he’d listen to reason.

Cullen swallowed, and started, “I know you won’t become a demon, but that’s partly the problem – this magic is outside of your control. Your mood swings-“

“My mood swings have been a ‘me’ problem for over a year,” Asha ground out. “I won’t lie and say that things aren’t more difficult since I woke up. But then, that’s kind of what happens when the people you thought you loved lock you in a room and take your entire organisation from your hands.”

“You’d only just woken up. You were ill.”

“ _I_ get to speak for myself, thank you,” she snapped, and then stilled, consciously choosing to make herself quiet. Hurting him wouldn’t help either of them. He was afraid, and she couldn't let him retreat into that fear until he was blind to the person in front of him. And, despite the fact that he was, apparently, a fucking moron, she loved him. She didn't _want_ him to be afraid.

She raked a hand through her hair, and then, carefully, took a step forward. Cullen didn’t move an inch, watching her, as she reached out and placed her hand over his, where it was braced against the desk, as if in pain.

“Cullen,” she said, softly, like she was trying to calm a frightened horse. “I know what happened to me must’ve been frightening, and I’m sorry-”

“Why are you apologising?” he immediately responded, almost like a reflex, “it wasn’t your fault-”

“-I’m not apologising for being attacked,” Asha continued, in a level tone. When she tightened her grip, his hand was lax and unresisting, and she threaded her fingers through his with a firm pressure. “I’m saying that I’m sorry you had to watch someone you loved get hurt again. You’ve already been through so much, more than a lot of people see in a lifetime, I’m sorry that you had to suffer more. It must have scared you, and taken you back to a dark place. One I never would’ve wanted you to go to, not without me.

“But I’m not someone under the thrall of a demon, and I’m not someone long since dead. I’m _here_ , talking to you.”

Cullen’s gaze finally left the floor. In the corner of her eye, she saw the box, upturned with its contents spilling over the floor. The sight made bile rise in her throat. But his golden eyes finally looked at her face, finally _saw_ her, and drank her in, almost like he couldn’t believe she was real. Like she’d died in front of him days ago and until now, he’d thought she was simply a ghost.

“Now, listen to what I have to say,” she continued, calmly. “Neither you, nor Cassandra, nor Leliana have the right to decide how we deal with this problem. You’re all coming at this from the perspective of the Chantry, and you’re not approaching it rationally. No matter how frightened you are for me, you are also frightened _of_ me, regardless of how hard you try not to be. But _I’m_ the one this is happening to. _I’m_ the Inquisitor. The Inquisition has survived this long and done this well because I’ve challenged all your assumptions on many, _many_ things, and I’m not about to stop when my own life, or yours, is the one at stake.”

She rubbed a thumb over his knuckles soothingly, trying to will him to listen, to soften the blow. And then, silently, she let go of his hand, walked past him, and stamped down on the box's contents with the heel of her boot, until she heard glass crack.

“As Inquisitor,” she said, turning back to face him, “I refuse to let you take lyrium again.”

Cullen looked down as the clear solution – the solvent that was mixed with the powdered lyrium to make it drinkable - leaked across his rug. Asha supposed she should’ve maybe just burnt up the box or lopped it into a rift, but it was too late now.

“I’m not doing this for your sake,” she continued, in a hard voice, as he dragged his eyes back up to her face. “But for mine. I don’t trust templars to understand how to deal with this problem. In that version of events, someone ends up killing me.”

She stepped forward, and took both his hands in hers, lifting them to her heart from where they’d flopped back uselessly at his sides. Creators, but he looked exhausted. No doubt he’d trapped himself within a cycle of torturous thoughts that had kept him up for days.

“I’m not going to pretend that this isn’t terrifying,” she murmured, holding both his hands in front of her like she was almost in prayer. “I might fuck up, and I might do something stupid, but we can’t just lock me up on the assumption of what I ‘might’ do. I’ve been dealing with painful, uncontrollable magic for a year now – and I’m a fucking expert. It’s frankly insulting of you to assume that this is going to be awful. While it’s unlikely that Corypheus or Samson did this to me without there being some really bad side effects that make me dangerous, I also have this _really funny feeling_ that they also expected you to cut me down the moment I got turned. They underestimate the Inquisition. They do not believe we can adapt. They think we’re a Chantry army, on some kind of a crusade. And Samson, I’m pretty certain, assumed that you are the same man you were three years ago.”

Cullen was looking dazed, and frightened, but also like he couldn’t bear to open his mouth and question her. It was clear that, more than anything, he was afraid to lose her. That was why he’d come up with this convoluted mess of a plan in the first place – rallying all the pieces of disparate logic he had available to him around that single, nearly mindless goal. Asha trusted that he didn't want her to die.

And Asha would use that.

Because sometimes, you couldn’t trust people to do the right thing, particularly when it scared them. And she had to use every weapon at her disposal to make sure it happened, regardless.

It was an act of self-preservation, but also it wasn't. This was what she was here for – to show him the way out from whatever darkness he somehow thought he ought to dwell in. His mind always went to the worst option – both in regards to himself, and in regards to mages. They had no hope together, if she didn’t prove him wrong and change his mind.

Asha placed a hand on his face, stroking a thumb across his cheek, and wondered if it was selfish to force him to change in such a painful way.

“If I’m an abomination,” she continued, looking up into his face and willing him - forcing him - to believe her, “then we’re going to use the fuck tonne of power they’ve just handed to me on a platter, to destroy them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God am I doing hurt/comfort right? I'm too far through the pandemic to tell.


End file.
